


Assemble

by Paper0wl



Series: Rod and Shield [8]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Assemble - Freeform, Gen, but family problems is better than no-family, emotional meltdown, family always causes problems, fury-odin comparisons, gabriel is a party crasher, loki-lucifer comparisons, usually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:24:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1867830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paper0wl/pseuds/Paper0wl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Insofar as most everyone she’s <em>actually</em> related to generally wants her dead, Kyria Lux, agent of SHIELD and daughter of the Morningstar, considers Clint Barton family. So when an alien visitor graduates from fire-breathing deathbots to kidnapping Clint as part of his “glorious purpose,” Kyria . . . doesn’t react well. Good thing there are an awful lot of aliens she can take it out on. </p><p>Or . . . not so good, because they’re trying to invade New York after all.<br/> <br/>Either way, no one invited Gabriel, but that’s never stopped him before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assemble

**Author's Note:**

> As a birthday present to myself I finally finished R&S Avengers. It ended up being as long as the whole first part of the series combined. Probably because all the characters are attention hogs and don't know how to shut up. And I thought _Bridges_ took a lot of revisions.

She slid through the night as noiselessly as a shadow, tracking the wolf. She had almost caught her quarry when her phone announced her location for anyone to hear.

“Shit! Jake!” Kyria shouted for her hunting partner as she scrambled for her phone. Ending the noise, she had to drop her phone as the wolf lunged for her. She ducked, letting a low-powered electric charge jump between them. Unfortunately, the werewolf shrugged the attack off. Of course it did. Why should taking down a werewolf be _easy?_ This was _her_ life after all.

She had yet to find the right level of power to take down a supernatural creature effectively. Too low, like this one, and her effect was negligible and ignored, while too high could kill the victim. Which rather negated the point of going for live-capture in the first place. The idea was to take them alive so SHIELD’s specially selected scientists could work on a cure or a way to combat the symptoms. She wanted to _help_ these people.

Most hunters grumbled about the new capture-not-kill directive, but there were enough dangerous creatures that _couldn’t_ be helped that the complaints about “ganking” being quicker and less hazardous that capturing hadn’t overridden the advantages of SHIELD support. If something hadn’t been human to start with, all the scientific research in the world wouldn’t get it there. And in the exceedingly rare cases where such a creature was willing to work within the bounds of human law – Eleanor, for one – Kyria was the one that had to handle negotiations.

Between the exponential paper generation of secret branches of secret organizations and juggling coordinating and protecting assets with Proper Creature Protocol, Kyria rarely got to do fieldwork.

And invariably when she did Murphy dropped in to say hi. In this case by setting a werewolf on her.

Kyria dove through a thicket to put space between herself and the wolf, wincing as the thorns tore at her bare arms. The werewolf charged through after her, ignoring the plant’s prickly attack.

_Pfft._

A tranq dart appeared in the creature’s shoulder. It shook its head. Taking the opportunity, she straightened and took a slow step backwards, grimacing as a branch broke beneath her foot with an obscenely loud _crack._

Yeah. That figured, didn’t it?

The werewolf’s next lunge was brought up short by the butt of the tranquilizer gun slamming into its jaw. An additional two darts were manually stabbed into the beast’s side. There was a weak growl and the werewolf collapsed.

Kyria eyed the wolf warily as Jake checked to make sure it was out. It was. “Not as bad as it could have been.” Then she spotted her phone on the ground. Winced. “Not _again.”_ She picked up the crushed device and wondered why she was even surprised the werewolf had stepped on her phone. She spent far too much time replacing her phones. Thirteen years with SHIELD, the last four heading NINJAT, and even riding a desk drowning in paperwork to keep her ninjas hidden even from most of SHIELD her phones died with alarming regularity.

She sighed. “I need to borrow your phone.”

Jake smirked as he handed it over. Kyria rather suspected her people had a running pool going on the lifespan of her phones. Clint ran the one on Ash and Charlie’s on-going prank war with IT (the techs there still didn’t know who kept messing with their settings), but she didn’t know who kept book on her phones. It was probably better that she didn’t know.

Even having only seen it for a moment, Kyria knew the number that almost screwed up their hunt and dialed it with an ease of long familiarity. It connected immediately.

“What have I told you about calling me in the middle of a hunt?” she demanded.

“It had damn well better be important enough to get someone killed,” Coulson recited back to her. “We have a Level Seven.”

She stiffened instantly. “Where and what?”

“New Mexico boomeranged – Loki took PEGASUS.”

“Loki as in God of Mischief, Thor’s brother?” It had to be him, because the only other Loki she knew was her uncle and as much as he loved to prank, he wouldn’t attack a SHIELD installation. Not to mention her uncle wasn’t involved with New Mexico. (This time anyway – she had her doubts about Roswell.) “No kidding New Mexico boomeranged.” It had been nearly a year, and Thor _said_ he would return. But Loki wasn’t Thor and last anyone had heard, Loki tried to have Thor killed and Thor went home to stop whatever his brother was scheming.

Kyria had no idea what had happened on that end of things, but Dr. Foster was still working on her Einstein-Rosen Bridge, and Dr. Selvig was studying at the PEGASUS facility with –

“Clint was at PEGASUS.” Her words sounded unnaturally flat to her ears for such a simple statement of fact. He was fine, he had to be fine, Phil would have told her if he wasn’t –

“Barton has been compromised.”

Something dangerous stirred in the pit of her stomach. It tasted like anger and despair and horror and indignation all at the same time. “How so?” Her voice was dangerously level. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. Compromised wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even necessarily injured. It was –

“Fury said Loki’s staff turned his eyes blue. The affected became unwaveringly loyal to Loki while retaining their skills.”

_– stolen –_

“The facility’s rubble and we’re calling everyone in. Lux?” he asked, sounding worried even through the static interference disrupting the connection.

The edges of her vision crackled with lightning.

“What’s happening?”

Coulson sounded far away. So very far away.

Kyria couldn’t breathe as conflicting emotions warred within her. She didn’t know what to think. Stolen. _Her brother._ He had been taken. _Mine._ Gone. _No._ Taken. _Mine!_

“Kyria?!”

The phone died in a shower of sparks as coils of lightning trailed up her arm. Tongues of white-blue light crawled across her body as her breathing quickened.

Eyes widening, Jake picked up the unconscious werewolf and bolted for the Humvee.

He didn’t stay to see her eyes turn black.

 

***

In the cloudless darkness, the strange light phenomenon was visible for some distance. Rogue lightning spiraled outward from a fixed point near the ground, cracking across the sky and devouring nearby trees caught in its fury.

From the center of the conflagration there was an inhuman cry of pain and the lightning abruptly ceased.

 

***

After locking the tranq-ed werewolf in the cage in the trunk, Jake turned one of the spare phones over in his hands. Protocol said he had to call in the alert for a possible Supernova Event. But protocol tended to be . . . _irregular_ around Lux and her ninjas.

Lux and her ninjas worked for a department that didn’t exist on paper anymore. In a feat of phenomenally ironic naming, NINJAT had lasted two years as a division of SHIELD before disappearing like ninjas in the night. Officially, NINJAT never existed. Because it had been such a small, obscure department within SHIELD, hardly anyone noticed the change.

Officially Agent Kyria Lux, codename Orion, was a nominally freelance agent who ran down leads on the Director’s say-so.

Unofficially Kyria was still Head Ninja and all NINJAT activities continued under a very extensive paper trail masterminded by her, Coulson and Fury and carried out by the same with assistance from the Tech Twins. Ash and Charlie made a devastating combination and had been known to prank the _official_ SHIELD IT department when bored.

They got bored surprisingly often.

But, as Jake understood it, Fury ordered NINJAT to disappear because the ninjas were dangerous. The Stage Show were the first (aside from Orion), and not only did they all possess potentially deadly abilities, _they got those abilities from a demon._ Jake had no doubt that there was a contingency scenario in a file somewhere detailing the best way to kill him should it become necessary. Most NINJAT assets, unofficial though they may be these days, had similar files. Since they tended to be entangled neck-deep in freaky shit out of a sick cross between the Grimm brothers and MIB or the X-files, it only made sense.

And since Kyria was hands down the Most Dangerous Ninja, in charge of the ghost department of very dangerous people dealing with very dangerous people, it really only made sense that she had an entire repertoire of encoded scenarios designed to deal with her. SHIELD had a very thick file on What To Do If Orion Flips. Admittedly with good reason because while Jake bench-pressed eight hundred pounds and could probably tear through a tank hardly breaking a sweat, Kyria was the daughter of an interdimensional energy being more commonly known as Lucifer. And an anti-tank weapon really couldn’t compare to _the Devil._ Or his daughter at any rate.

Hence his worry over a possible Supernova.

Supernova roughly meant Morningstar-at-large. Kyria-out-of-control. Eating a nuclear power station fifteen years ago made her _formidable,_ to say the least, on a good day. Having been around when she single-handedly held dozens, if not _hundreds,_ of demons at bay, Jake was in no hurry to see what she could do batting for the other team.

In the four years he’d been a part of the organization, he’d seen Lux to be very capable and very dangerous. Aside from a few small scale instances, mostly demonstrations or minor SNAFUs, he had never seen her live up to the title of Light-Bringer. Certainly nothing like this light show. Which meant possible Supernova. But there had never been any Supernova warnings, which was part of why he hesitated to call one in now.

Mostly, it was that Jake trusted Kyria a helluva lot more than he did most people, even if he couldn’t tell his family the details behind how he met her in the first place. As a CO, and as a person, she was good people. She cared for all her agents, and her hunters, and her assets (a fancy SHIELD-approved name for people Kyria arranged protection for due to the weird shit in their lives, even if they didn’t know about it). Protocol and secret-spy-paranoia aside, Jake thought it would take something pretty spectacular for Kyria to go dark side, _if_ then.

Plus, she’d been on the phone with Coulson, about Barton, and seemed more in shock than anything. Everyone had a right to react poorly to bad news.

So he pocketed the phone without calling anyone and made his way back.

He found the head of SHIELD’s most dangerous unofficial division kneeling in the center of a scorched circle of earth. For at least forty feet in all directions around her, there was nothing but smoldering trees.

He couldn’t help but whistle at the destruction one loss of control and five minutes worth of work wrought.

At the sound, she raised her to look at him. Meeting her exhausted expression, Jake was grateful he hadn’t called anything in.

“You okay?”

Her nod looked like it was all she could work up the energy for, so he closed the distance and helped her to his feet, tactfully ignoring the ash beneath his feet.

“This is why you don’t work with regular hunters, isn’t it?”

Her laugh was bitter and tired, but unmistakably a laugh. Reassured that the best boss he’d ever had wasn’t going off the rails anytime soon, Jake helped her back to the Humvee, as she haltingly tried to explain the situation. It was strangely reassuring that the closest she’d come to blowing her top was at the shock of hearing her oldest friend had been compromised.

Everyone was a little damaged somewhere.

Whatever anyone else thought, Kyria was good people.

 

***

“Agent Romanoff, would you show Dr. Banner to his laboratory, please?”

With a nod, Natasha walked away, leading the doctor down the hall. They didn’t get far before Talley came looking for her with a harried expression.

“I thought you were never going to get here!” the former Army soldier exclaimed. “She’s pulling a Stargazer and I’m not good enough to fight her for long.”

“Barton?” she asked tightly, already knowing the answer. Given how screwed up they all were, none of them made friends lightly. Therefore, once someone earned the title of “friend,” they would walk through fire for them. Kyria had been Clint’s friend even longer than she had, so if _she_ was swallowing nails, Kyria had to be feeling worse. Love might be something for children to believe in, but family was something she’d learned from Clint, Kyria, and Phil.

At least Natasha had a job to do – Kyria mostly had paperwork.

Talley nodded emphatically. “She didn’t take the news well.”

“Not well” wasn’t particularly informative. Natasha raised an eyebrow.

Having spent enough time around both Morningstar/Orion and Black Widow to not be frightened by reputations and to understand when a single eyebrow meant _explain what you mean_ rather than _give me a reason why I shouldn’t just kill you now, no one will ever find your body,_ Talley elaborated. “She burned down just over five thousand square feet of Indiana forest when Coulson gave her the news. I . . . almost called in a possible Supernova.”

She failed to adequately contain her flinch at that. Banner noticed. “Let me show Dr. Banner to his lab so he can get started finding the damn cube, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Talley nodded once with relief and disappeared back down the hall.

Supernova. That was . . . bad. Worse than an alien god mind-controlling her friend. Supernova was her other friend going crazy and needing to be stopped by any means necessary. Natasha would do what was necessary, but that didn’t mean she ever wanted to have to use her stiletto.

For that anyway. It was oddly comforting to know she possessed a blade no one could take from her on a mission. Not that she ever needed it, but it was there. And it wouldn’t feel the same if she had to use it on Kyria.

“May I ask what that was about?” the doctor inquired curiously.

She wasn’t sure of the best way to explain this. ”A mutual friend of ours was recently compromised.”

“Compromised how?”

“By an alien god with mind-control powers.” Granted, she was friends with the half-human daughter of the alien considered to be the devil, but alien gods were still kind of a new thing for her; she’d never met Kyria’s alien/archangel uncle.

He blinked, as if waiting for the punchline of the joke. When none was forthcoming, he looked thoughtful for a few moments before speaking. “At least she took her issues out on a section of uninhabited forest rather than a sizeable chunk of Harlem,” he offered tentatively.

She really needed to watch her laughter. Her answering laugh was one even she would consider dark and Banner didn’t look very comfortable. Then again, “Doctor, Harlem was a casualty of your fight with the Abomination. Kyria, if she ever does go Supernova, would make your alter ego look positively tame in comparison.”

Heading off to the gym to talk with Kyria, Natasha left Banner in his lab, looking very disconcerted.

 

***

Having a purpose only did so much when there was nothing for him to do yet. It didn’t help that the entire ship was bursting with all sorts of new-fangled technology he didn’t pretend to understand. With a murderous Norse god on the loose and every window a stark reminder that everything he knew was seventy years past, however long (or not) it felt to him, Steve fell back on what little he could count as reliable and asked directions to the Helicarrier gym.

He froze in the doorway upon realizing it was occupied.

The woman had a hand on either side of the punching bag and was leaning her forehead against it so Steve couldn’t see her face. But the lines of her shoulders on either side of the loose braid of black hair had a tense stiffness that looked like something he saw in the mirror on the rare occasions he could stand to look. From the doorway, it looked like her grip on the bag was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

“You have a purpose or do you just like lurking in doorways?” she asked, not altering her grip on the bag.

He jerked. “I, uh – “ _still can’t talk to women. Obviously. Unfortunately._ Whatever the decade, Steve didn’t know how to handle himself around dames. Girls. Women!

_I’m hopeless._

The woman pushed off the bag gently and turned to face him with a faint smirk that didn’t reach the exhaustion in her eyes.

“I assume you came to use the facilities?” she asked.

Slightly embarrassed and off balance, Steve considered himself lucky to have managed a nod. Sure he’d seen plenty of women wearing pants since waking up, and the more than a few of them displayed a fondness for rather form-fitting apparel, but that didn’t mean he could handle being alone in SHIELD’s gym with a distraught woman with her midriff showing.

Not when he hadn’t even been able to keep his head around women back in the forties when everything made more sense.

“If you want to be useful, I could use a sparring partner,” she offered, mercilessly (or truthfully) ignoring his discomfort. “I scared off Jake and Nat needed a break.”

“Um, I, uh – “

“Good. Thanks.” She turned and went to ready the mat.

Okay. Assertive.

“Generally, yes.”

Steve flushed. “I said that out loud?”

She smirked back.

The problem was that while, yes, a sparring partner made for a better workout than a punching bag, the super-soldier serum made Steve stronger than average. He looked a little dubiously at the slender woman waiting on the mat.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea. I don’t want to hurt you – “

“You won’t,” she said crisply. “I’m stronger than I look, Captain, and I’m sure we’ll both agree that a punching bag isn’t as good as a person who knows what they’re doing.”

“Well, yes – “

“Good.”

And before he could try to protest any further, she threw a punch at his head.

Blocking it, and the kick that followed, Steve was willing to admit that she was stronger than her appearance suggested.

“Glad to hear it, now stop holding back,” she demanded irritably, blocking a (weak) punch.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he tried to argue.

Her next hit went below the belt and she just smiled innocently at him when he caught it. “That’s the least of your concerns.”

Her blows gradually picked up speed and Steve had to do likewise as her technique got dirtier and a lot less polite. While she had _started_ with the types of techniques he had been taught in training, she began adding the sorts of things he’d heard about or picked up in the thick of the war. Clearly, she had _fought,_ and Steve didn’t know how he felt about that. Not even Peggy had been able to shake his belief that women should be protected (even if they could protect themselves).

Eventually he stopped thinking and let muscle memory take over.

It was only when she stepped back with raised hands and a more relaxed expression that he realized he was sweating.

He couldn’t remember the last time someone had been able to keep up with him in a fight. Usually he had to hold back unless he was training against a group. (The Howling Commandos had been gone for years, no matter how brief it felt like to him. It was hard to mourn something that had been gone for seventy years, but that didn’t mean he didn’t.)

“That’s more like it,” she said, tossing him a water bottle and draining her own. “Told you not to worry about hurting me.”

“How’d you do that?” And he winced. He was just really good with the dames, wasn’t he?

She smirked like she knew what he was thinking before beginning stretching.

He began stretching himself, hoping a distraction would help as he tried again. “I mean, there aren’t many men who can keep up with me – “

And her smirk widened as he dug himself in deeper.

“I’m just gonna – stop while I’m ahead,” he suggested.

That got a short laugh. “Phil get you to sign his cards yet?”

“You know, you’re the second person to ask me that.”

“Yeah, well, he’s very excited about it all. Hasn’t stopped fanboy-ing since they found you on the ice.”

“I, uh, got that impression,” he replied to her almost terrifyingly wide grin. Although not entirely certain what she meant by “fanboy,” it seemed clear enough, especially given Agent Coulson’s evident awe on the ride over. He winced in remembrance, not comfortable with such hero-worship.

Her grin widened further as she began humming a song he groaned to recognize from his show days. “I’m not one for propaganda, but the tune’s catchy,” she remarked lightly, stretching out.

“I used to hate that song,” he found himself admitting.

“Yeah, it sucks to have all this power and not be able to do anything,” she replied. Her expression darkened and Steve abruptly realized they were no longer talking about him. “The Director barely even let me on this ship in the first place and there’s nothing I can do and it’s killing me.”

She had impeccable control because although her voice presented the impression she was alternately furious and about to have a nervous breakdown, her form on the stretching exercises was as perfect as his Army drill instructor would have wanted.

Then her grin was back, darker than before. “It’s called a Stargazer, you know. Jake named it because of all the astronomical codes used around me. It means I’m taking out my frustrations in the gym for hours on end. It’s probably time for a shower now, anyway. Thanks for the workout,” she announced before striding out of the room.

Steve stared after her wondering what the heck just happened.

 

***

Kyria didn’t go to Germany. It was too public a venue and what she wanted was Clint, not Loki, anyway. Plus, she wouldn’t give good odds to her ability to restrain her emotions and not fry the plane’s equipment. The Helicarrier was better protected against irregular power surges. She hadn’t been this wrecked since Matt died.

It felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under her. While she was standing on a flying carpet. And now she was just falling and falling, with no ground in sight.

All because her uncle’s namesake made her friend into his puppet. Forced her oldest friend to the other side of the battle lines. In a manner eerily similar to possession by the demons that had haunted her steps for centuries.

But it couldn’t be demonic possession because Clint had gotten a protection tattoo years ago. So had Nat, Phil, and her ninjas, SHIELD’s doctrines on no identifying marks be damned. Fury was still trying to work out a way to thusly mark all of _his_ agents, without letting them know.

But _this_ not being demonic made it was something Kyria didn’t know how to fix.

The overhead light died in a shower of sparks. Again.

She took a bulb from the box in her closet and replaced the light. Again.

Clint was her first real friend. She may have met him when he tried to kill her, but he had surprisingly open-minded about demons and all that came with them. Coulson may have backed the decision and Fury may have seen the potential benefit, but Clint had been the one to see the demons, see her be _Morningstar_ to fight them and offered her a hand anyway.

Phil and Nat were her friends because Clint disobeyed orders to bring her in. Fury gave her the resources to undermine her father’s demons because of Clint. The hunters had better support because Clint brought her to SHIELD. A cambion and a fallen angel were protected because of Clint. Kyria had been granted an opportunity to build herself a _life_ because of Clint.

Clint had been the keystone of her life with SHIELD. More than that, he was, in every way but blood, her _brother._

And Loki took him.

Loki took her brother and turned him against himself and his friends.

It made her so angry. So very, very angry. Matt’s death hadn’t made her angry – it had just broken her into lots of tiny pieces without a solid grip on human relations. Clint wasn’t dead, though, which seemed to make the difference. He had been _taken_ from her, and apparently she took poorly to having things _stolen._

It scared her how angry she was. Angry and possessive and volatile and unbalanced. All the baser, darker traits she inherited from her father. The death of the partner she’d trusted at her back for centuries had shattered her to her foundation; the theft of the brother who’d given her the chance to make something from her pieces brought out just what that foundation had been born from. There was Morningstar, and then there was _Morningstar,_ and she far too close to the latter.

Sparring with Captain America had taken the edge off, but she couldn’t run from herself forever.

It didn’t help that she was terrified of turning into her father. Angels had hunted her and Matt for all that time for a _reason_ after all and it wasn’t (just) because they were generally sanctimonious pricks.

Azazel had needled her by calling her Morningstar, knowing she didn’t care for the association, knowing she couldn’t fight the truth of it. Demonic chattering about Morningstar was how the name leaked to put her on SHIELD’s radar in the first place.

Which brought her thinking back to Clint. Three cheers for mental ruts.

Just another reason why Nat was the one sent in to draw information out of the prisoner while Kyria hid in her room, trying to calm herself.

Breathe.

_Lucifer was imprisoned._

Breathe.

_Lilith was still in Hell._

Breathe.

_They couldn’t touch her._

Breathe.

_They couldn’t touch her friends._

Breathe.

_Loki had Clint._

Breathe.

_Fireworks shows wouldn’t help her get him back._

Breathe.

_Clint needed her._

Breathe.

_He needed her sane._

Breathe.

_She was Kyria._

Breathe.

_She was Orion._

Breathe.

_She was Morningstar._

Breathe.

_She wasn’t her father._

Breathe.

_She was Clint’s friend._

Breathe.

_Clint needed his friends._

Bre –

Kyria was thrown across the room as an explosion rocked the Helicarrier.

 

***

There were alarms and sirens everywhere. Kyria lay sprawled on the floor for a moment listening to the pandemonium and trying to catch her breath.

She gasped.

There were _three_ swords from heaven’s armory on board the Helicarrier. Well, their proxies anyway. Angelic blades weren’t necessarily corporeal. But they marked their bearers. And Kyria recognized the three blades as having been hers at one point. But they weren’t swords anymore. One was a stiletto, one was a letter opener, and the other was –

An arrow.

Clint was on board.

Damn. He was probably the source of the explosion. Explosive arrows packed a punch. She had a rather painful memory of being too close to one of those once.

She scrambled for her earpiece and the door.

A roar echoed through the corridors. She hesitated. Clint was on board. But so was the Hulk. And a man, even one with explosive arrows, was easier to take down than the Hulk. She’d have to trust Nat could get Clint. With a grimace, Kyria altered her path toward the direction of the roar, trying to find a voice of sanity amidst the comm chatter.

“– Hulk and Thor on research level 4. Levels 2 and 3 are dark!”

“Sir, the Hulk will tear this place apart!” _No kidding._

“Get his attention.”

“Escort 6-0, proceed to wishbone and engage hostile. Don’t get too close.”

Wait. Sanity? Yeah, no. Because feeding the Hulk an escort jet was a _great_ plan.

“Are you crazy?” she burst out before she could stop herself.

“Lux?” Fury demanded.

“Write me up for insubordination later, Director. I’m on the Hulk. Get that pilot out of there!”

She burst in and ducked around the spray of bullets just as the Hulk roared again. Yes, shooting out the windows of a pressurized ship was a great plan too. Who came up with these bad ideas? And why was he still shooting?

The giant green bundle of rage didn’t like it much either and started running for the blasted window and the jet still shooting at him. Exactly why she wanted the jet gone. Although, probably why Hill wanted the jet _there._

 _“Shit,”_ she exclaimed, instinctively throwing out a hand.

The Hulk roared in pain and anger as he hit a window frame suddenly full of electricity. Her ears popped at the abrupt change in pressure as the breach was sealed. Huh. Okay. That worked.

Through the static on her earpiece, she thought she heard Fury call her name.

“Little busy, Director,” she replied, dodging a large green fist and calling tongues of lightning from her impromptu barricade to follow her path. The next best thing to impenetrable fencing. Just what a Hulk called for. “Trying to keep him contained. Great call on blasting a hole in a pressurized vehicle though.” Oh, she was going to regret that later. Too busy right now to worry about her sarcasm though.

Another fist to dodge, another roar. What possessed her to take on the Hulk in close quarters? Oh right. Stupidly suicidal mindsets learned from SHIELD.

Suddenly a jolt resonated into her from where her trails of lightning met the Helicarrier’s electric system. And the floor began to tilt.

“I fucking _hate_ you,” she yelled to the universe.

A fist smashed her into the wall.

“Ow.”

The fist came down again but she rolled away.

“You know, we would all get along a lot better if you stopped smashing your way through walls and windows keeping this pressurize piece of shit in the air. Not that it’s quite staying in the air at the moment, but that’s what sabotage will get you. Massive problems. But I wouldn’t have a problem with you if I thought you’d leave my co-workers alone.”

Hulk roared and tried to smash her again.

Kyria felt a laugh bubble up from her chest. “Glad we cleared that up,” she said sarcastically, dodging the fist and catching it in a net of lightning. The second hand joined the first as Hulk ignored his pain receptors. Well. Not ignored. He drew power by turning his pain into anger. “Right. New plan.”

Unable to score a hit on Kyria, Hulk charged the wall instead. The walls were covered in interlocking vines of electricity, floor to ceiling in an effort to keep him contained, and those held, even as supporting structures rattled. The strands of crackling blue-white lightning turned green where they touched the Hulk.

“Interesting,” she observed in surprise. Another roar and Hulk was back at her, correctly judging her as the source of the lightning. Kyria responded by dancing around the devastated room and leaving electric chains floating in the air behind her.

She didn’t know what would happen when she ran out of power – she didn’t even know _if_ she _could_ run out of power. She was part interdimensional energy being (Fury had refused to accept “angel” or “demon” on reports even before the Great Firewall of Ninja) and had consumed the better part of a nuclear reactor. Considering she rarely used her supernatural abilities and there really wasn’t anyone else remotely in her weight class, she’d never needed to test it before now.

“I haven’t had a real challenge since. . . I don’t even know. Never used to be my thing, but I see the attraction.” Sparring with Natasha and Rogers was almost as good, but there was an element of real danger here that the gym never had.

In response, the Hulk roared at her, trying to find a gap in the lightning to reach her through.

She circled around, trying to get back to the doorway when she felt the second jolt in the ship’s systems.

A snarl escaped her lips. _“What the_ fuck _is going_ on _on this ship?!”_

Rapidly losing patience with the entire situation, Kyria clenched her fists. The web of green lightning slowly draining the gamma radiation powering the Hulk contracted around the raging green monster. There were bigger concerns than what a little gamma radiation would do to her. Besides, it couldn’t be worse than that nuclear power plant.

“Sorry about this, but you’re a problem the Helicarrier doesn’t need right now. There shouldn’t be lasting effects from this.”

Hulk flinched away from the increased contact, hunching around himself, slowly shrinking as the anger and energy bled away.

Dr. Banner had barely dropped to the floor before Kyria turned herself inward and tapped into the damaged systems. The information hit her in a heady rush and it took a little time to sort through it all. The first explosion was Engine 3. She knew that. As she watched the system readings, Stark got it working again and the carrier began to level out. _Good._ And _shit_ that was Loki taking off from the flight deck. But, _ooh_ Nat took down Barton in the lower equipment section. _Not yours,_ she gloated at the retreating god at the recognition and confusion Barton exhibited before Nat knocked him out.

Not before he had crashed the controls for Engine 1. Good thing Stark got a third engine back up. Falling Helicarriers were bad. That had been the first jolt. The second –

Kyria hardly felt her knees hits the damaged floor as her eyes looked out from the cameras in the detention section overlooking the empty spot where Loki’s prison used to sit.

“I’m clocked out here,” Coulson said weakly.

“Not an option,” Fury ordered.

Kyria agreed. _We just got Barton back. I am NOT losing you!_

Coulson seemed prepared to disobey orders. A rarity, yes, but not altogether unheard of. “It’s okay, boss. This was never going to work . . . if they didn’t have something . . . to . . .”

A fury of emotions welled up in her chest, so tangled Kyria couldn’t sort them out, could only understand their meaning:

_No._

Morningstar reached out through the electric system and built a network of lightning in the hole in her friend’s chest.

Fury’s intake of breath was audible.

The medical team arrived and Kyria barely watched as Fury shook his head at them. She was vaguely aware he was lying when he announced, “They called it,” but was too busy maintaining the pulse of Coulson’s circulatory system to object.

A tiny voice in the back of her mind distractedly pointed out that it was called the _Avengers_ initiative and even _Phil_ knew having someone to avenge would bring the unlikely team together. That same voice pointed out that Fury had ordered her to hide NINJAT and Morningstar years ago because he didn’t even trust _SHIELD_ with that kind of dangerous, uncontrollable knowledge. Phil had a hole ripped through his chest, through his _heart_ and _lung_ and the only reason he was still breathing was because she had an interdimensional energy being for a sperm donor.

But he _was_ still breathing.

 

***

Fury found her outside the medical bay. She didn’t remember how she got there. Her head throbbed in time to a second heartbeat and it crackled with electricity.

He pulled her into the observation room overlooking the small operating theater where three members of SHIELD’s specialized medical team worked on the second person she met at SHIELD. Her second-oldest friend, the second member of her new family.

“You doing this?”

Her head felt like it was wrapped in several layers of vibrating cotton as she nodded absently.

Fury frowned at her. “Anyway you can keep it up without zoning out like this? Even in this fucking shit-storm disaster, someone would notice an agent moonlighting as a zombie.”

She tilted her head to stare blankly at him. One of the doctors yelped as he touched the smooth white-blue patch and got an electric shock. Through it all, Coulson’s heart beat beneath her skin.

It was rather distracting, she admitted to herself, unable to make her tongue form the words to tell the director. Looking down at her hands, a letter opener appeared in her fingers. Etched in the center of the blade was a lightning bolt that zigzagged from the tip to a handle shaped like a hawk.

Fury barely raised an eyebrow. “That’s the weapon you gave him.”

She thought she could hear the undertones that she never gave a similar weapon to the director, but she wasn’t his concern. He had his agency. She had Clint, Phil, and Nat. And her ninjas, but they weren’t supposed to exist anymore. They were hers first and SHIELD’s second, and Fury knew that when he dissolved NINJAT.

But this wasn’t about her ninjas – this was about Phil’s heartbeat in her head and how distracting it really was.

She wouldn’t let it stop. Not for an alien god interloper who tried to take what was _hers._

A silvery knife materialized in her other hand. This one was still hers. Had been hers since she took it from one of the numerous angels that tried to kill her. Phil was one of hers. And she would _keep_ him. Her fingers curled over both weapons, tight enough to draw blood, and she _pushed_ the second heartbeat into the blades.

Opening eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed, she saw an identical letter opener in each hand. The lightning bolts caught the light in a way that made them seem to glow. Kyria exhaled, letting her shoulders relax as she did.

“Keep this safe,” she said, handing Fury Coulson’s letter opener. Regardless of who carried it, it was _Coulson’s._

He tucked it into his coat without comment.

The second angelic letter opener pulsed quietly in her hand for a moment before vanishing, taking its rhythmic beat beneath her skin. The beat was distant and detached, but in no danger of faltering.

White-blue sparked along the cuts on her palms, sealing them.

“That’s new,” noted the Director.

“Probably from the gamma I ate,” she remarked absently, still staring at her hands.

“Good job with the Hulk. Even if you did announce yourself over an open comm-line.” He looked pointedly at her with raised eyebrows.

She resolutely did not wince. Maybe in the chaos no one would notice Orion beat the Hulk all by herself. Yeah, and maybe she would get together with the black-eyes and the choir boys and sing Kumbaya. Everything that happened during that mess was going to be picked over with a fine-toothed comb. At least she wasn’t the only alien involved.

And that wasn’t the point.

“You don’t strong-arm someone to come work for you and then throw them out of an airplane when it becomes a problem.”

“He would have survived. I couldn’t say the same about my boat.”

“So you _shot holes_ in a _pressurized system?”_

“It was either that or let two goddamn loose powerhouses break everything. Didn’t know you could handle the Hulk.”

“Now we do,” she said shortly.

“Now we do,” Fury agreed.

The monitors in the operating theater kept time to the faint thrum at the edge of her perception. She still turned to look at Phil Coulson unconscious and breathing – still living – before leaving.

 

***

She didn’t go far after parting ways with the Director. She had more than one friend in medical, after all.

Unsurprisingly, Natasha had beaten her there. Nat probably came straight here after hearing the immediate crisis had been resolved, while Fury had needed to handle a situation report before waking her from her dissociative episode.

Kyria arrived at Clint’s door just in time to hear the Russian say, “I got red in my ledger. I’d like to wipe it out.”

“Don’t we all?” she said, announcing her presence even though the assassin and the sniper probably heard her coming from down the hall.

A pained grimace flitted across Clint’s face even as Kyria noticed the loosened restraints that must have been in use before verifying the archer was himself again. “None of what happened is your fault, Clint.” She knew him more than well enough to know he was feeling guilty for his part in Loki’s swath of destruction. And she quickly continued before he could argue, because she also knew him well enough to know that he would blame himself for it _all_. “Remember how you met me. I have experience with this. Happens to the victims of black-eyes all the time. Something else had control of your body and you were nothing but the suit it wore.”

“I wasn’t a _suit,”_ he protested, face twisting with guilt and denial. “I _knew_ what I was doing – “

“But you weren’t in the driver’s seat,” Kyria pointed out. “Dean calls it a meatsuit – it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but the duck’s not calling the shots.”

“I am a trained agent and I _know_ how to fight things that aren’t human,” Clint said through clenched teeth.

Kyria met his eyes. “I’ve seen people from all walks of life turned into puppets and playthings by a number of things. Those creatures _live_ by stealing others’ wills. You couldn’t have gotten away. Believe me.”

“I could have fought harder!” he protested, every word heavily laden with guilt.

“I’ve been doing this for _ages_ and I have never heard of someone successfully fighting off a possession. People who have been hunting for _decades_ can’t retake their body from a demon. Not for more than a moment or two. And those were _demons._ Loki is a god. Alien, yes, but still a god. Not remotely in the same weight class as a demon.”

Clint wasn’t about to accept there was nothing he could have done. “There are agents that _I killed –“_

Kyria cut him off. “There are no SHIELD agents that got a personalized Clint Barton Send-Off. In fact, the only two you shot at are still walking around. Fury point blank and Hill in her jeep – yet they’re still here. How’s _that_ for Mr. I Never Miss My Shot? You took them out of the fight non-fatally. Same with the explosion on the bridge. And you know this carrier plenty well enough to have done worse than you did.”

He shook his head in denial. “I blew up an engine, I brought mercenaries past security. Anyone who died during that fight – “

“Is on _Loki,_ ” Kyria insisted. “Do you blame the arrow or the archer? You were an arrow in Loki’s hands. Any blood that was spilt is on _his_ hands.”

There was a stubborn set to his jaw and Kyria tried not to clench her teeth as her patience was whittled away. “You really want to play this game, Clint? Our lives might be comparably screwy but I can out-guilt you any day of the week. There are people out there – _victims_ – that I _knew_ were victims – that I knew were _helpless_ – that I killed because I was too screwed up in the head to take the extra time to free from the black-eye and just killed them both instead.” It was more expedient to stick in an angel blade rather than rip out the demon, less involved and quicker to move on to the next demon, and the next, and then hightail it out of there before more could be sent. With Matt, they’d usually taken the demon out, even if some of the unfortunate vessels died anyway, but after . . . she’d just wanted to get away. “I knew what I was doing _every_ time.”

Kyria knew what it was like to live with the guilt of blood on your hands. But while Clint had followed the wrong people’s orders and Nat had been molded into an assassin from a young and impressionable age, Kyria had killed because she’d been hurt and scared and trying to run away from her own anger and fear.

She didn’t even remember the faces.

“Don’t play this game with me, Clint. You will lose. I have more red in ledger than _both_ of you.”

The three of them were screwed up. Totally and completely. Any one of their lives could keep a therapist occupied for _years._ It was probably why they got along so well.

Clint looked away. “Even if that’s true, I’ve been compromised. They’re gonna cut me loose.”

And that cut deeply, didn’t it? SHIELD was their second chance. Without SHIELD, Kyria would probably be dead, whether by demons, angels, or her own spiraling self-destructive tendencies. She hadn’t been in a good state of mind after Matt. Not by a long shot. Without SHIELD they’d all be dead, or worse.

But they _had_ SHIELD and each other. Her blood relations might be abysmal, but she had made a new family and woe to anyone who tried to take it from her.

She hadn’t forgotten Loki. He’d get what was coming to him, one way or another.

Kyria gave a smile that was all teeth and completely feral. “Then _I’ll_ take you, Barton. I didn’t nearly go Supernova when Loki stole you to lose you to yourself or to SHIELD. If they don’t want you, or try to bench you, I’ll snap you up so quick they won’t know what hit ‘em. _You_ brought me in and now you’re _stuck_ with me. That’s what family is. Deal with it.”

 

***

Between the fight with the Hulk and the double emotional turmoil of Phil and Clint, Kyria needed a shower. A quick one, with a change of clothing from general stores, and she almost felt human again. Not that that expression was ever quite accurate because she was never quite human to begin with.

Tying her wet hair back into a braid, Kyria headed for the bridge. She had always been bad at sitting still and signing on with SHIELD only exacerbated that part of her nature. Patience was one thing, but sitting on her thumbs was another matter entirely. The Helicarrier was just about dead in the air, with no communications and a fired engine, and she was something of a tech expert.

Hill met her at the control center with a sparse nod toward an empty terminal. Kyria sat there hashing out patches for the comm relays, phasing herself in and out of the systems, when a flash of red overhead caught her eye.

She looked up to see Nat give her the signal for _target acquired_ and _move out._

There was a slight churning in her gut as she considered. Going would make her a _de facto_ Avenger and ever since first hearing of the program, she thought it was too public a place to put herself. Having forced NINJAT underground, not even Fury wanted her in that noticeable a position, regardless of how “remarkable” she might be.

But she’d already attracted notice by announcing herself with the Hulk.

And Loki made this all very _personal_ for her. He’d directly attacked _two_ of her family. While she had gotten both back, she wasn’t so quick to forgive.

And not even a direct order from a very irate Director would keep her from backing up Clint and Nat. Not that Fury had given her any orders to disregard in this, but she would have anyway. She didn’t twiddle her thumbs when her people needed her, she went and _helped_ them.

So she gave a minute nod, finished the patch she was in the middle of, and quietly slipped off the bridge. She met up with the group at the foot of a Quinjet where Captain America was too busy awing the pilot off the plane without sounding an alarm to do more than blink in recognition as Nat welcomed her on board.

As the plane took off from the Helicarrier, following Iron Man to New York, Dr. Banner studied her. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

Her grin was wry. “Yeah. I’m the reason you didn’t jump off the Helicarrier after the idiot pilot Hill set on you. Well, the other you.”

Nat leaned out of the cockpit. “I don’t think I did a proper introduction,” she said with a grin of her own. “Everyone, this is Orion, also known as my friend Kyria Lux.”

“Kyria,” Banner repeated in quiet recognition, his eyes comically wide.

“Nat, what have you been telling people about me?”

The red-head’s affected an innocent expression. “All I said was that you had the potential to make the Hulk look like a kitten. You’re the one who decided to prove you could subdue him single-handedly.”

“You fought the _Hulk?”_ Clint asked from the pilot’s seat. He whistled. _“Damn,_ Lux, you’re crazier than I thought.”

Captain America looked around in confusion. “You fought the Hulk? How? Did someone recreate Dr. Erksine’s serum?”

“It was an attempt to recreate that that made the other guy in the first place,” Banner countered, looking at her curiously.

Kyria sighed. She volunteered to get on this plane, and it was going to come out eventually, no matter how well she handled the cover-up paper-trail. “I imagine I’m closer to Thor than I am to you.”

“Where’d the big guy get to anyway?” Clint asked.

“Loki stuck him in the cell and ejected it. He’ll probably catch up to us in New York,” Kyria added. No way was Thor going to leave this alone.

“Were you the reason there was a force-field on the wall when I woke up?” Banner asked. “Because I think I remember something about you and lightning?”

“A force-field?” Clint repeated. “Like _Star Trek?_ Kyria, I’m telling you, you need to stop hiding all the fun stuff.”

“Fun,” she repeated with a disbelieving snort. “Right. Because being only half-human is definitely what I would call ‘fun.’” That was the cover story Ash and Charlie had worked into her files. It even had the benefit of being true. The whopper of a doozy that had gotten covered up was the _name_ that accompanied the fact. Also the age, but that wasn’t as dangerous.

“Half human?” Rogers repeated.

She nodded. It was an exercise in futility to try denying it now. “My father was an interdimensional energy being. Basically an alien,” she added at his confused look.

“You father was an alien?”

Saying he was an alien sounded a bit like sugar coating matters. Even _interdimensional energy being_ didn’t get close to _infamous fallen archangel,_ especially the part where _half the world recognized him as the devil._ But, yes, calling Lucifer an alien was _technically_ accurate in that he didn’t originate from Earth. It did, however, also woefully understate things.

Kyria wasn’t explaining any of that, so she just nodded again and called up blue-white coils of lightning to slide up and down her arms.

“You took down the Hulk with that?” Rogers said with wide eyes. “Why didn’t Director Fury bring you into the Avengers Initiative originally?”

She grimaced at the reminder. So much for covert. She might as well hang a sign in the middle of Manhattan reading _I’m not human._ That was about what she was doing, actually. “I wanted to stay off the radar. Fury agreed that was probably best.” He’d been a lot more colorful than that, but that was splitting hairs. “Then Loki made it personal. And Nat asked me to come. I don’t turn down my friends when they ask for help.”

“That reminds me – I got you a present,” Natasha announced.

Kyria reflexively caught the bundle flung at her head. Unrolling it she blinked. “Really? I shot Clint down years ago when he said I should get a cat-suit.”

Nat crossed her arms. “There is no way I’m letting you fight aliens in New York looking like a new recruit.”

She glanced down at her black SHIELD t-shirt and cargo pants. As comfortable and unimposing as they were, “I’ll grant you the point,” Kyria admitted. Unimposing wasn’t quite the image associated with stopping aliens from invading.

Nat smirked and disappeared back into the cockpit.

As if on cue, Kyria’s phone started ringing. There weren’t many people who had her number, especially given how often she had to change phones, and fewer still she was willing to talk to at the moment, but she checked anyway.

“Hey, Charlie.”

“Jake says you’re doing something stupid and I kind of have to agree. I thought we were all agreed that none of the ninjas were appropriate for Fury’s team of weird-ass heroes. Not that Captain America’s weird or anything. He’s like, the opposite of weird. And if I was straight, I’d probably totally have a crush on him. Which actually might be weird. Because he’s like, ninety of something, but only looks twenty – and it’s really weird to think he’s there at all because I read comics about him as a kid.”

“Charlie – “

“Right. So, Jake says you’re in charge, and I know that, and I want you to know that I completely understand where you’re coming from on wanting to protect us all by leaving us out while you go fight off an alien army led by the guy who attacked your friends and probably knows your uncle – _does_ he know your uncle actually? _That_ would be weird.”

“My uncle hasn’t answered my phone calls in two years, so I wouldn’t know,” she said tightly, annoyed at the reminder.

“Oh. Okay. Really? Two _years?_ Does he see time differently or something? Because I never understood that, but I suppose it would make a lot of sense – “

 _“Charlie!”_ she exclaimed, interrupting the seemingly never-ending flow of words. “Was there a reason you called?”

“Right. Jake said what you were doing was stupid but you’re in charge so we should help if we can. _Can_ we help?”

Kyria opened her mouth to say no when a thought occurred to her. “How are you at hacking on the fly?”

“Not as good as Ash, but a lot better than I was two years ago. Why? What do you want us to do?”

“Well, I figure if it comes down to fighting aliens in the streets, there are going to be a lot of cameras on the ground and I imagine we’d all be happier of our faces were kept out of it as much as possible.”

“Ooh. I think we can do that, right, Ash? We can do that?”

“Definitely, Lady Lux,” the second member of the Tech Twins agreed fervently. “Just faces? I think we’ve got enough time to set up a monitor. There’s a lot of sites out there for posting videos. And if you’ve got an actual alien army, the net’s gonna be ablaze and we need to get started.”

There was a hasty “good luck” and then the call ended.

Kyria looked up to notice Rogers and Banner staring at her.

She was saved from having to initiate conversation by Clint asking, “Tech Twins?”

“It would undermine my ability to disappear if my face got plastered all over the cable networks,” Nat remarked.

“They’re taking care of it,” Kyria agreed.

“You can _do_ that?” Banner said with no little disbelief.

She snorted. “I wouldn’t put it past the two of them to hack into the CIA database if they wanted to find out who killed Kennedy.”

“Think they’d mind looking that one up for me?” Clint asked. “I’ve always wanted to know.”

“Not right now,” Nat rebuked.

“And they . . . work for you?” Rogers questioned.

“Uh.” That was where things got tricky. “Technically they work for SHIELD, but for a department that doesn’t exactly exist. Fury ordered it hidden. Ash and Charlie are the two who made it disappear.”

“Why?”

Deep waters here. “Because I’m not human and I’m not alone. There’s a surprisingly large number of not-human things out there and my department was tasked with keeping them contained. After one of them breezed past SHIELD security like it didn’t exist, Fury decided to restrict the knowledge of that sort of thing, considering a breach in security.”

“This one of those classified, _it’s complicated_ things?” Banner asked.

“Pretty much,” Kyria admitted with a grimace.

“Does it affect the mission?” Rogers wanted to know.

“Beyond that I can handle whatever comes my way and we might be able to keep some semblance of privacy if we survive? Not that I know of.”

“Okay then,” Captain America nodded. “We can discuss it later. For now, let’s worry about Loki and the Chituari.”

 

***

Between Stark and Thor, Loki apparently was not pulling his punches and decided to shoot them out of the sky when they arrived.

“I can force my way through a lot of electrical problems, Barton, but the _wing_ of the plane _being on fire_ is _not an electrical problem!”_ Kyria exclaimed hanging onto the wall for dear life, while Rogers dangled from the ceiling and Banner was the only one smart enough to be strapped into his seat.

“Yeah, I thought as much,” Clint replied, voice strained as he struggled to stabilize the Quinjet. “Couldn’t hurt to ask, though.”

They hit the ground gracelessly and ran out, intent on getting back to Stark Tower, because _of course_ Stark Tower was the center of the warzone.

“So, this all seems horrible.” Freaky looking aliens everywhere, intent on destroying everything, and oh look – a giant armored alien whale flying overhead.

Banner was evidently a master of deadpan.

“I’ve seen worse.” Natasha was better.

“So have I,” Kyria found herself admitting with a grimace. Of course, none of that worse was anytime in the last couple thousand years, but black-eyed armies and righteous angelic warriors weren’t something she easily forgot. Especially when both sides had agendas involving her.

Clint gave her a sideways look and she shrugged.

“Sorry,” Banner said, visibly torn.

“No. We could use a little worse,” Natasha replied.

And while Natasha’s pep talking skills needed work (a lot), she did have a point. Kyria had _Issues_ about everything Morningstar-related, but keeping life-threatening, world-altering secrets, while undeniably important, ranked somewhat lower than _stop the Chitauri from destroying Manhattan (and then the world)._

“Stark are you seeing this?” Rogers asked.

“I’m seeing, still working on believing. Tell Banner to suit up. I’m bringing the party to you.”

Banner, already looking a little green from the not-so-textbook landing, obligingly Hulked out and went to town on the aliens.

At least the Hulk wasn’t trying to smash _her_ anymore.

The rest of them alternated between firing on the Chitauri and getting civilians out of the immediate area. Cap, predictably, recruited the police officers to help clear out the civilians.

“Just like Budapest all over again,” Nat said cheerfully firing her guns repeatedly at the alien invaders.

“You and I remember Budapest very differently,” Clint replied, as yet another arrow flew home into a Chitauri skull.

“There were aliens in Budapest,” Kyria countered, shooting off bolts of energy from her hands.

“One. And you weren’t trying to kill us!”

Kyria felt the lightning before she saw it descend from the sky to kill the last few aliens in reach.

“What’s the story upstairs?” Rogers asked after Thor touched down on the ground.

“The power surrounding the cube is impenetrable.”

“Thor’s right,” Stark commented over the comm. “We gotta deal with these guys.”

“What happened to that party you promised?” Kyria asked.

Hulk roared in agreement.

“Coming . . . now.”

On cue, Iron Man flew out from behind a building, leading a very unfriendly alien leviathan.

Natasha stared. “I . . . I don’t see how that’s a party,” she said.

The Hulk did. He smashed the thing on the nose, causing it to flip up and lose its armor. Stark shot at the now exposed creature causing it to explode and rain down nasty alien bits.

The Chitauri roared, probably in disapproval and vengeance, and more of the army poured out of the hole in the sky.

“Oh good, more giant flying space whales,” Kyria noted, ripe with sarcasm.

“Call it, Cap,” Stark said, bestowing on Rogers the dubious honor of leadership.

“Alright,” Rogers – no, Captain America – said, “listen up. Until we can close that portal up there, we’re gonna use containment. Barton, I want you on that roof, eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays. Stark, you got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or you turn it to ash.”

“Wanna give me a lift?” Clint asked.

“Right,” Stark agreed. “Better clench up, Legolas.” He grabbed Clint’s back and flew up.

“Thor,” Cap continued, “you’ve gotta try and bottleneck that portal. Slow them down. You’ve got the lightning. Light the bastards up. Lux – I never saw your file, do you work better up high or on the ground?”

Kyria caught sight of one of the flying alien sleds. “I’ve always wanted to fly.”

“Okay. You help Thor and Stark.”

Thor offered her a hand up and she accepted.

Flying by hammer was very disconcerting. Getting dropped by a god flying by hammer onto a flying alien chariot was very startling. Kicking off the aliens and trying to hack into the thing before it crashed into anything was very . . . exciting.

To think just a couple of hours ago she’d informed the Hulk about the lack of challenges in her life. Yes, she was in the field again and Murphy was reminding her to be careful what she wished for.

“You look pretty freaky with the electric balls and the alien hoverboard,” Clint remarked, not turning as he shot a Chitauri that came up behind him.

“I’m gonna have to go with Legolas on this one,” Stark remarked over the comms. “Who are you again?”

Kyria didn’t answer, having just crashed the sled in the next space-whale’s eye and using that to conduct electricity into its brain to fry it. If ever there was a time to find out what it took for her lightning to run dry, today might be it.

“Clearly someone who knows what she’s doing,” Stark answered himself. “Carry on.”

She leapt off the dying, falling monstrosity to wrestle another Chitauri rider off its chariot. “Thanks for the approval,” she said dryly.

“Stark,” Nat called, trading in her empty guns for an alien energy rifle, “Lux’s deadlier than me.”

“She ate a nuclear reaction once,” Clint added, firing yet another arrow.

“And you have the equivalent of a nuclear reaction in your chest,” Nat continued leadingly.

“It this really the time?” Rogers exclaimed.

“Team building exercises, Captain!” Clint explained.

“That’s right, Captain, team-building exercises. Wait,” Stark backtracked, “I thought taking on an alien army together was supposed to be today’s scheduled team-building workshop. Did I miss a memo or something? And why was I never introduced to the woman who ate a nuclear reactor? Bad team-building right there. Someone should look into that.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Natasha noted.

“Also,” Stark added as he flew around buildings, under tunnels, and through whatever he could ride to lose the riders on his tail, “She shoots lightning? I thought that was Thor’s party trick.”

“Half alien,” Kyria explained.

“If that half looks half as bad as these guys, then you have my profound apologies,” Stark said, sounding almost sincere.

“Never met my father, but I have it on good authority he’s very attractive. Only good thing I got from him is my ability to manipulate energy.” She aimed herself at a squadron of alien flyers, sending off almost as much lightning as Thor.

“Hey,” Clint said suddenly. “Portals are a type of energy, right? And we’ve seen a portal before.”

“Not like this! Wyoming was a lot smaller and it was never really open in the first place.” She swerved to avoid getting shot, using Clint’s suggestion to take every turn available to lose the Chitauri since Stark proved it worked. She wasn’t sure if the fact she flew the vehicle better than the aliens she stole it from was a testament of her ability or their stupidity. Possibly both. “Plus, that gate was more my type of energy, you know?”

“No, I don’t,” Rogers said flatly.

“Eh, it opened to a dimension on the same sort of wavelength as what I operate on.”

“So you’re not after my arc reactor?”

_“Stark!”_

“What? Inserting a little levity here. It’ll be great.”

“Lux, none of this is gonna mean a damn thing if we don’t close that portal,” Nat pointed out tiredly.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Kyria grudgingly agreed. Again with Nat having a point.

It was only instinct that let her catch the energy fire aimed at her back. Absorbing the blast through her hand, she turned to look at its source.

Her eyes narrowed as Loki’s widened.

Palming a ball of crackling energy, she let fly and had the satisfaction of watching blue eyes widen further as he ducked to avoid the hit.

What followed was the bastard child of a car chase and follow-the-leader. Kyria didn’t know who the leader was or who precisely was chasing whom, but she couldn’t leave him to his own devices while she tried to shut down the portal. Loki would find a way to make things worse than they already were.

A third chariot charged in between them and Kyria blinked at Nat’s driving methods. Apparently a knife in the driver’s brain was as good as a steering wheel. Who knew?

“Thought you could use a hand,” Nat said, with a predatory smile and a shot at the pursuing demi-god who looked almost confused at this turn of events. “Besides, this looked fun.”

“Nat, what are you doing?” Clint asked.

“Playing tag. You’re it.”

“I’ve got him,” Clint replied with a grin.

The three of them had far too good a time watching Loki crash into Stark’s tower when the arrow exploded in his face.

Nat leapt from her chariot onto Kyria’s, which she then landed on the roof. Selvig lay sprawled on the side, slightly dazed, but once more in possession of his own mind. He explained that even under the influence he built-in a safety to cut the power source. And when crashing into the penthouse, Loki had been considerate enough to drop his scepter.

Kyria was relieved she wasn’t expected to wing a portal shutdown (again). The gate in Wyoming was something she knew, and even then, she hadn’t been the one to close the portal – she’d just gotten to it before it opened and used her connection to its source to keep anything from coming out. This portal was very different from that one.

Of course, if there wasn’t a convenient method to close the damn thing, Kyria would bite the bullet and attempt to strong-arm it closed. She didn’t have to. Instead, she blasted Chitauri away from the tower while Nat retrieved the mind-control scepter.

Kyria bled away some of the force-field surrounding the cube as Nat forced the scepter through.

But Stark prevented them from closing the portal.

“The council,” Kyria said through gritted teeth. “Have I ever mentioned how much I really hate the fucking council?”

In addition to not approving of secretive, semi-autonomous agents who didn’t listen to them, the World Security Council apparently thought dropping a nuke on the largest city in the country when they had the situation (barely) contained was a first class idea.

And while sending the nuke through the portal actually was inspired, martyrdom wasn’t.

But Kyria didn’t have a better idea so she just stood there mutely draining away energy as Iron Man’s suicidal run through the portal made the Chitauri collapse en masse and Nat followed the command to close the portal before the nuclear blast came through.

And then Kyria was ruthlessly shoving her way into Stark’s system, looking for the specs on that suit because she really didn’t want to accidentally blow him up after he managed to miraculously fall through the portal before it shut.

There was no doubt that he was in fact _falling._

She wasn’t entirely surprised to find an intelligence in Stark’s programming, but it was disconcerting. She wasn’t used to dealing with AIs. Although this one, admittedly, was probably just what she needed right now because it was connected to the suit and computers talked faster than people.

_[What’s wrong with the suit?]_

She had the sense it was – _nonplussed?_ – at her intrusion. Also, uncertain who she was or how she got there.

She followed Stark’s unsurprising and repeated hacks into SHIELD and pulled up the classified-but-accessible alien version of her file.

It offered her security footage of herself with Nat and Selvig on the roof in return.

_[That’s me.]_

_[Low power, systems frozen]_ with the appropriate technical designs was the response.

She barely spared a _[thanks]_ and a warning to get the equivalent of autopilot ready before a bolt of energy shot out between her and the Tesseract and she threw her other hand out to the man in the falling suit of armor to channel the raw power needed to reactivate Iron Man before he ran out of space.

The instant she made contact with the Tesseract her world turned **blue**.

A sharp, icy blue that pervaded every fiber of her being, even as the she made the second connection a bare instant later, becoming a living vessel for all that power.

She couldn’t breathe. It was all too much.

And then it wasn’t.

She could feel _everything._

The line of pure electricity stretching outwards from her fingers, slowing his fall.

The way the power tore through a body not made to hold it and caused the body to waver and stumble and _change_ to keep hold.

The weak hum of the arc reactor in his chest, growing stronger as she fed energy to it.

The scratches and dents littering the surface of the cold metal as tongues of lightning crawled over every inch, radiating heat and power.

The moment the AI took control of the suit.

Releasing her hold on Stark’s suit also severed her connection to the Tesseract and the sudden absence of _blue _ disoriented her for a crucial moment as she tried to reassert control of a suddenly unfamiliar body that was distracted by the edge of the building.

And then the lack of building edge.

Wind whistled around her ears and Kyria couldn’t quite think why that was a problem.

Something slammed into her, rattling her teeth and knocking the breath from her lungs. The world shook violently and spun before everything finally stopped.

_Ow._

It took a few tries to clear her vision and by the time her eyes were functional again, she was encircled by four Avengers looking at her with varying degrees of awe and curiosity.

“I take it that means no hard feelings about the lightning cage then, huh?” she coughed out around the giant Hulk-finger shaped bruises she could feel already starting to form around her ribs.

The Hulk roared his agreement and that apparently broke the tableau.

“Romanoff is very happy you aren’t dead,” Rogers informed her. Kyria thought that was probably a translation. Natasha tended to threaten her friends when she thought they were being stupid. Falling off a building because she was energy-drunk counted as stupid. Although why wasn’t Nat yelling at her herself?

“What? Oh. I fried my comm again? I do that a lot,” she admitted weakly. “Ow. What am I sitting on?” She turned to try to sit up and stopped abruptly.

“I know you said you were half alien but you didn’t mention anything about being half bird. I don’t remember seeing feathers earlier. And if anyone was going to suddenly sprout wings,” Stark continued, “I would have picked Birdbrain.”

“Barton reiterates his request that you stop hiding all the fun stuff,” Rogers relayed. “And he doesn’t appreciate being called Birdbrain.”

“I hear him,” Stark said, unimpressed.

Kyria poked at the black feathers splayed against the broken pavement. Yep. Those were real. And attached to her. “This isn’t my idea of fun,” she said weakly, trying to understand what just happened.

Rogers opened his mouth, stopped to listen to something, and then asked, “Does Barton usually jump off buildings?”

The bubble of hysterical laughter hurt her already bruised ribs. “That figures. My heritage comes around to bite me on the ass and he wants me to be his spotter.”

A large hand was extended to help her to her feet. It made getting up without tangling herself in her two new feathery appendages much easier, although her ribs protested the movement.

“That was most courageous what you did, Lady of Lightning Internal. ‘Twas truly a feat worthy of song.”

She blinked at the title. And the suggestion that her life be made into a musical.

“Courageous?” Stark exclaimed, sounding appalled. “She hacked JARVIS! That’s not courageous, that’s impossible! No one hacks my stuff,” he continued, apparently annoyed enough to let the wing thing drop. _“No one._ I’m a genius and JARVIS is my master work of art. You don’t get to just barge in and attack my system.”

“I’m pretty sure he means thank you,” Rogers said with a sharp glance over at the where the Iron Man suit was standing.

“No,” Stark corrected. “If I meant thank you, I would have said thank you. Although, now that he mentions it, thank you for not leaving me to get saved by the Hulk. That looked painful. Which begs the question: how are you still alive? Cause, you know, you don’t have a handy protective suit and the human body is not designed to channel the sorts of energy you were throwing around or the way the Hulk was throwing _you_ around. I know you said you were half alien, but that still seems like a lot to take there. Unless you got something like Banner or Capsicle. Did you get something like Banner or Capsicle? Probably not, because I would have heard about it. If I was paying attention, which isn’t guaranteed.”

Kyria coughed out another laugh. Her ribs were not happy. “My father was an interdimensional energy being,” she said, trying to work out what to do with the wings that hadn’t stuck out of her back ten minutes ago. “I haven’t mapped out the extent of what I can do.”

“Huh. How does that work?”

“As interesting as I’m sure this discussion is, Loki is still in the tower,” Rogers pointed out sternly.

“Yeah. Fine,” Stark grumbled good-naturedly. “Crazy god now, alien science later.”

 

***

Surrounded by a complete set of unhappy Avengers, and still feeling the dents Hulk put in the floor, Loki finally seemed to realize he’d lost. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink.”

“Good choice. The alcohol’s much better than last time Asgard stopped in for a visit.”

Six Avengers whirled around to face the intruder, weapons raised.

Kyria just sighed. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” she told her uncle, who lounged at Stark’s bar, unconcerned about the animosity in the room. “Two years. You couldn’t pick up the phone _once_ in two years? Maybe graffiti another wall? _Anything_ to let me know what was going on with Raph? Cause not knowing what’s going on with the uncle that tried to kill me makes me a _little_ bit anxious.”

“You hide it well,” Gabriel replied with a grin.

“Okay, now I just want to shoot you more,” Clint returned, shaking his head and lowering his bow with a poorly concealed wince. Nat’s gaze darted between Clint, Kyria, and Gabriel before she followed suit.

Gabriel’s grin widened for a moment before he turned to Kyria. “I didn’t call you cause there’s nothing to say. You want to know? Fine. Raph’s on some kind of meditative retreat. Still trying to wrap his head around me being alive and protecting you, I’d say. That’s the sort of thing that really alters one’s world view, you know.”

“Thank you,” she said icily, feathers twitching behind her.

“I’m sensing some unresolved issues here,” Stark said, pointing out the obvious. “You know this clown?”

“Clown?” Gabriel repeated in offense. “I’ll have you know I’m a _trickster.”_ He snapped his fingers.

Kyria blinked. Stark’s beat-up Iron Man suit was dressed as a clown.

“What manner of sorcery is this?” Thor exclaimed in puzzlement. “This is unlike any magic I have ever heard tell of.”

Gabriel sighed. “Ah Asgard. It’s been such a long time since I had to deal with any of those warriors. Big on brawn over brain them. And arrogance. Oh the arrogance. Reminds me of so many others that arrogance. My brothers mostly. They’re an arrogant bunch. But you. You _named_ us. We had a name, thank you, none of that celestial sentinel crap or whatever it was you people decided to call us. If you’re gonna name something, at least make it a cool name.”

“How does one make a name cold?” Thor asked in confusion. Loki gave a bitter laugh, but aside from some glances, everyone mostly ignored him.

“Uh, what are you?” Rogers asked as delicately as he could manage. (More awkward than delicate, really.)

Gabriel looked over at Kyria and grimaced. “Didn’t I say trickster? I know I said trickster.”

“Instead you did, sir,” said a disembodied voice. “But I fail to understand how ‘celestial sentinel’ or anything of that vain would apply to a trickster, even if my programming is unable to grasp the full magnitude of what a trickster entails in this instance.”

“Nice catch, J,” Stark said, having finally divested himself of the clown costume and make-up. “That was JARVIS in case anyone was wondering. And he raises a good point. Who are you, what are you, and how do you know Orion here?”

“Orion?” Gabriel repeated.

Kyria bit her tongue. “My SHIELD codename.”

The archangel shrugged. “Not terrible, I suppose. The hunter. Rather appropriate, actually.”

“Glad you approve.”

“Not entirely sure I approve of the plumage though. Mine’s not tangible.”

“If I knew how to make it _in_ tangible again, I would,” Kyria said dryly.

Ignoring the other people present, Gabriel strolled away from the bar and circled Kyria to poke at her wings as they fluttered in agitation. Hulk growled threateningly but Kyria shook her head.

“This is my uncle Gabriel.”

Gabriel frowned petulantly. “Why do you insist on telling everyone that name? You know I’m undercover.”

Kyria smirked. “It’s your name and I’m not calling you Loki when the real one just tried to level Manhattan and is sitting right over there.”

“This being seeks to usurp my brother’s identity?” Thor thundered in indignation.

“He wasn’t using it,” Gabriel remarked flippantly.

Kyria shot him a glare. “It’s . . . complicated.”

“Like your classified department about non-humans?” Rogers said suddenly.

She exhaled slowly. Tired and sore from a battle, with wings she didn’t have a clue about was not how she how she wanted to handle this explanation, but the universe seemed to have other ideas. “Exactly right,” she agreed wearily. “Okay. To start, my name isn’t Lux. Well, officially it is, on paper anyway, but I was always Morningstar.”

“Morningstar,” Rogers repeated. “Like . . .”

“Lucifer, the devil, Satan. Whatever you want to call him, he’s my father.” She sighed. “And I’d really rather only do this once, so unless Dr. Banner is going to de-green himself, record this somewhere no one will ever be able to find it.”

Hulk bared his teeth at Loki, who flinched, and Gabriel, who rolled his eyes and snapped up a chocolate bar. As Stark sputtered at the display, the Hulk shuddered and shrank. Banner blinked around the destroyed room. “Did we win?”

Stark shook himself. “Okay, to recap. I flew a nuke through the portal and took out the entire armada cause I’m just awesome like that. Kyria did some kinky energy thing where she stopped me from falling, grew wings, and fell off the building. The other guy caught her. Short and snarky over there is her uncle Gabriel, probably an archangel, since the devil’s her daddy. Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you de-hulked because she asked you to.”

Banner blinked, clearly having difficulty processing all of that. “The other guy caught you?”

“Yeah,” Kyria began tiredly at the same time Stark exclaimed, “Seriously? _That’s_ what you focus on? Not the wings or the archangels or even the de-greening on command?”

Banner tried and failed not to grimace as he shrugged. “The other guy doesn’t exactly have a great track record. The one and only time he deliberately saved someone, it was my old girlfriend and she was standing right next to him at the time.”

“Which only further colors the suspiciously fast lack of color,” Stark replied with a wide grin.

“Thank you for the lovely and wild speculations,” Kyria said dryly as Banner blinked at Stark in confusion. “If you’re quite done, I’d like to redirect this back to the archangel before I pass out from the adrenaline crash.”

Stark waved his hands at her. “By all means, Orion, shatter our religious beliefs.”

“You don’t _have_ any religious beliefs, Stark,” Natasha pointed out.

“Exactly! But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in hearing how uneducated masses have prayed to aliens for centuries and how an interdimensional energy being – incorporeal by definition – was able to father a child who has to be centuries old herself.”

Rogers gaped between Stark, Kyria, and Gabriel, looking like someone had hit the back of his head with a board. Gabriel snickered into his chocolate.

“You _are_ religious, aren’t you?” Kyria said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“What does this have to do with celestial intruder who seeks to claim my brother’s name in place of his own?” Thor demanded.

Kyria blew out a harsh breath. “There are generally two beings for every god or goddess. The one from another planet or dimension, and the one given form by human belief. Belief was recognized as a powerful thing long before _Peter Pan._ There’s a – a whole other world beneath the surface. Angels are interdimensional energy beings, they had a civil war, and Lucifer moved onto a new plane of existence, taking some fallen angels with him. They corrupted humans, creating demons, who in turn corrupt more humans, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

“The third major energy plane is – more haphazard. It’s closer to ours, although it’s gotten farther. Ages ago, where it spilled out onto the human plane, people got infected. Werewolves, vampires, skinwalkers, shapeshifters, djinn, they’re all real. The other group is the pagans, born from belief. Contrary to popular fiction, they don’t need that belief to survive, but they generally need _something._ Couple years back some hunter friends of mine ran into the Gods of the Winter Solstice who apparently granted clement weather in return for killing three men every year.”

“Three men every year?” Banner repeated, looking slightly sick.

She shrugged. “Three seemed to be the minimum and Sam said they griped about not having any more.”

“Sam being your hunter friend?” Rogers asked. “Is that what he hunts? Those creatures?” He seemed remarkably open to accept the existence of monsters, but then they _had_ just stopped an _alien invasion._

“For as long as there have been monsters, there’ve been humans who fought them. I met Sam and his brother four years ago when a demon tried to open a gate to Hell.”

“Is that the other portal Barton mentioned?”

She nodded. “Yeah, and because my father created Hell, I could manipulate that portal – same energies. That was the incident that made Fury realize this stuff was a real problem.”

“You’re telling me Cyclops didn’t know about the boogeyman before that?” Stark demanded. “Cause he acts like he knows everything.”

“Oh he knew. He knew when he sent Barton out after a mysterious loose cannon and Barton brought me back instead. But it wasn’t a problem and didn’t look to become a problem and most of the things in it would have no trouble killing one of SHIELD’s best, so he didn’t pursue it. Then came the Almost-Hellgate and he decided SHIELD needed more.”

She tilted her head and snorted. “Admittedly, I had just offered training to three people with dangerous powers and outed myself to two major hunter-dispatchers, so Fury probably figured I was off to a good start. But he dubbed me head of the NINJAT division and basically told me to get to work.”

“I’m sorry,” Banner said, “NINJAT?”

She sighed as Clint smirked. “No, I’m Not Joking About This,” he said.

“Joking about what?” Rogers asked in confusion.

“It’s an _acronym,”_ Stark corrected. “A very lame one, but strangely appropriate.”

Kyria huffed out a breath. “That just described every code and name associated with my department. Two years after the initial incident, SHIELD caught wind of a potential security breach and I ran into this egghead,” she continued, pointing at her uncle who had replaced his empty chocolate wrapper with a lollipop.

“You’re leaving out the part where I _saved your life,”_ Gabriel pointed out, punctuating his words with stabs of his lollipop.

“There was a prophet, and prophets are guarded by archangels, and angels generally don’t like me,” Kyria explained with a grimace.

“I do,” Gabriel pointed out. “Usually,” he added before sticking the candy back in his mouth.

“Yes, well, Gabriel decided to follow that up with pranking Clint,” Kyria said with a scowl. “In his room. On a secure SHIELD base.”

“Fury freaked the fuck out,” Clint remembered fondly. “But I got a stack of paperwork to fill out in order to get a bed. And I had to paint the walls before I could get a new room. Giant eyes on the wall. Creepy. And then Kyria taught me to ward off angels so it wouldn’t happen again.”

“Yeah, you’re no fun at all,” Gabriel muttered audibly.

Kyria ignored him. “Fury decided that if one entity could breeze past security, so could others, and he didn’t want to leave any evidence that could be tracked back to what we dealt with.” She sighed. “We spent over three months tracking down and replacing every piece of paperwork, every email, every personnel file, every electronic trace that ever existed. We made like our namesake and disappeared. And the bureaucratic red tape I have to navigate to keep the hunter network supported and invisible is extensive.” Her smile managed to be self-deprecating and predatory at the same time. “After all the time I spent yelling at hunters over the phone and traveling around the country to yell at them in person to get them organized and working together, there was no way I was cutting them loose. Even if Bobby pretty much runs the whole thing by himself these days.”

“That’s . . . good?” Rogers offered.

“Thank you for the lovely backstory, now please explain why this guy – “

 _“Archangel,”_ Gabriel corrected.

“ – is in my penthouse and not out curing lepers or something,” Stark said.

“Most of my brothers are assholes, especially about Lucifer, and Kyria, and Dad, and What Dad Wants. So I split. Ages ago. Went undercover as Loki cause no one was using the name. Ran into Kyria a while back and kept in touch. More or less.”

“Yes, yes, families suck,” Stark agreed. “But if you haven’t talked to her in two years, why now? Because, really, I don’t believe in coincidences, and there has to be a _reason._ Besides the dead army and the freshly sprouted feathers. Although those might be reason enough for me.”

“Yes, Gabriel,” Kyria agreed, “why _are_ you here?”

He made a face and his eyes darted sideways.

“No,” she said flatly, feathers puffing out despite her best efforts.

He shrugged.

“No,” she repeated. “Not happening.”

“No?” he asked. “And what do you imagine will happen?”

“Not that,” Kyria insisted.

“Not what?” Banner asked confused.

“You think Sir Hammer Hands over there is just gonna take him home and get Fury Sr. to pass judgment or whatever and that’s going to _change_ anything?” Gabriel demanded. “Cause I know a little something about dysfunctional families and disobedient sons, and Daddy laying down the law never works.”

“And running around giving assholes what’s coming to them is helpful how?” Kyria countered.

“Uh, what’s going on?” Clint asked.

“This is why I’m glad I don’t have a family,” Stark remarked.

“I consider you to be family, sir,” JARVIS stated as solemnly as an AI with a British accent could. “And as to what they are arguing about, one might speculate that Gabriel seeks to prevent Loki from returning to Asgard with Thor. He appears to be drawing parallels to religious lore regarding Lucifer’s fall from Heaven.”

“I can see that,” Natasha admitted thoughtfully.

“What exactly is St. Snaps-a-lot suggesting as an alternative? Cause I have an arrow that works on angels and am more than willing to test it on alien trickster gods,” Clint pointed out.

Natasha’s fingers twitched as if reaching for her own angel-killing weapon.

“Why should my brother not be brought home to face justice?” Thor demanded. “He is my brother and Asgard is our home!”

“Asgard is _your_ home,” Loki reminded him snidely. “It was _my_ gilded prison.”

“All the more reason he should go back to the people who know how to restrain him,” Stark noted. “Unless of course, we want to kill him, if which case I’m sure an _archangel_ could manage something to do the trick. If not, a genius, two master assassins, and the daughter of the most infamous villain of all could figure _something_ out. He did kill Agent after all. Not even Spangles would begrudge us that.”

“We don’t kill unless there is no other way,” Rogers reminded him sternly.

“Wait,” Clint interrupted. “What – what agent?”

Stark looked at him like he was slow. “ _Agent._ There is only one. Agent Agent. You know, always in a neat little suit, no sense of humor, fangirl-ed all over Captain Spangles – “

 _“Coulson?”_ Clint choked out. _“Phil?_ He’s dead?”

“You didn’t tell him?” Stark asked Nat. “I mean, Fury’s stunt with the cards was a little over the top – no true collector would ever carry those around loose in a pocket – but still – “

Some days Kyria really hated Fury. Clint did _not_ need this, not after Loki played with his head. And it would do _wonders_ with Nat’s trust issues. If she’d actually been coherent after the fact she might have given Fury a piece of her mind. Her wings flared off her back, interrupting Stark. “He’s not dead.”

_“What?”_

“Are you sure?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I witnessed the valiant Son of Coul be impaled – “

“Fury said – “

“First rule,” Kyria said evenly, “Fury lies. Phil Coulson is alive.”

“How do you know?” Nat pressed, and even though she was an expert at concealing emotions, Kyria had been around her well enough to read the desperate hope in the minute cracks in the Russian armor.

“Because I’m the one keeping his heart beating.”

“Is this like your secretary?” Clint asked, sounding a little worse for the wear, like he’d just lived his worst nightmare and wasn’t completely convinced it was over yet.

Kyria breathed out a laugh. “Don’t let her hear you call her a secretary, Clint. How many times do I have to tell you? Or are you determined to help her keep her skills up by giving her reasons to get back at you?”

“She _was_ the reason his face was purple!” Nat exclaimed, as if solving a puzzle.

“You swore you didn’t know anything about that!” Clint accused.

Kyria shrugged. “She was a thief and a con artist and the locks on the shooting range storage lockers aren’t the best. I don’t _know_ she was involved in rigging an arrow to explode dye in your face, but it is certainly within her abilities. And no, the thing with Phil is not remotely what happened with Beth.”

“Then how are you keeping him alive?” Clint pressed, knuckles white around his bow.

She bit her lip. “Force-fields.”

“Seriously?!”

She managed a shrug. “There are electric force-fields in the middle of his chest, keeping everything moving the way it’s supposed to.” Kyria turned a feral expression on Loki. “I take _very_ poorly to your attempts to take members of my family. First Clint, then Phil. I got them both back, but you still touched them. And I can be _so_ much worse than the Hulk,” she breathed.

Stark snickered when Loki flinched.

“Your eyes are black and blue,” Nat said tightly.

Kyria turned to face the assassin. “What?”

“Your eyes. Solid black with irises of lightning.”

“That’s . . . new,” Kyria said slowly, unbalanced by yet another new development with her life. “And not good.”

Gabriel snorted. “Come on, Kyria. If you were going to fall, you would have done so by now. The slightly crazy, slightly suggestible Wannabe-King-of-the-World played Puppet-Master with your brother and Operation with your friend. Sure, you got closer than ever to losing your cool, but instead of threatening eternal torment you’re standing here arguing with me about who gets to play jailer. I think it’s a safe bet that you’re good.”

Kyria tried to breathe evenly, wings tight against her back. “You sure? Cause there are no second chances with this sort of thing.” She had neither intention nor desire to fall, but that almost-Supernova in Indiana had her more worried than she let on.

Gabriel actually _laughed._ “Kiddo. Seriously. You tapped ultimate power up on that roof and all you did with it was save the Tin Clown and supercharge yourself into centering on your wings. Good job with the timing on that by the way – without the interference from the portal, the whole family would have noticed the wings. But you’ve got them now and you’re still here, so unless Lilith suddenly decides to go into business as a straight florist, no blood or side jobs, I think I can safely say you won’t be joining that side of the family.”

“Cain’s a beekeeper,” she pointed out, feeling oddly faint.

“Is that where he got to? I lost track after a few centuries.”

She nodded absently, still trying to wrap her head around the fact that she _wasn’t_ going to turn out like her father. Another thing she’d never wanted to do but could never quite discount. Still. If _Heaven’s Messenger_ was telling her –

“So the noble Son of Coul yet lives? I saw him take grievous injury and believed the worst had befallen him.”

She shook herself out of her reverie at Thor’s rumbling inquiry. “I’m possessive. Whatever Fury thinks, I count Phil as one of mine. And when I saw he was dying I . . . reacted.”

“Reached out through the flying fortress’ electrical system and anchored his soul to his body,” Gabriel elaborated, idly twirling his lollipop. “Rather impressed you didn’t blow out any lights this time.”

Kyria pursed her lips. “You’ve been spying on me. That figures. How many of my phone accidents have been you?” When no response was forthcoming, she shook her head. “Yeah, I meant everything I said about you being an asshole.”

Captain America looked like he swallowed a fish as she carelessly and casually insulted one of the pillars of his religion. Eh. He’d get used to it. Eventually.

“So Agent’s _not_ dead. Awesome. I wasn’t looking forward to telling Pepper. She would’ve cried. Then yelled at me for being a stupid idiot for flying a nuke into space, which is kind of redundant, but no matter how many times I tell her that, she still insists on calling me a stupid idiot. And reckless. She’s fond of that word too.”

Trust Stark to break awkward silences.

The billionaire rubbed his hands together. “So. We won. Threat neutralized. All that’s left is Reindeer Games. You guys sort anything out while you were yelling at each other?”

Gabriel smirked. “Oh, I like him.”

Clint groaned. “We’re doomed.”

Natasha nodded her agreement.

Kyria sighed. “I’ll grant that having Asgard deal with Loki hasn’t worked and probably will continue not to.”

“Why not?” Thor demanded. “He is my brother!”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Oh, Dad. Look, it’s all fine and dandy for you to extoll the fact that he’s your brother, but as long as _he_ feels like a falcon among eagles, _you_ aren’t _his_ brother. Believe me, I’ve got brother issues of my own. More than yours. More brothers than you too. Bringing him home won’t change anything – it will just highlight all the flaws.”

Thor narrowed his eyes. “What is it you suggest be done then, abrasive kin to the noble winged lady?”

Eyebrows rose toward honey-colored hair. “Abrasive?” Gabriel repeated in disbelief. “Me? How can you say that about me?”

“Because he’s a very good judge of character,” Clint muttered. “Family aside,” he added, to the incredulous looks he was getting.

The archangel shrugged. “I can keep him in line.”

One delicate red, Russian eyebrow arched up.

“What? Archangel, remember? I can handle one screwed up alien demigod. Please.”

“By your own admission, you have poor relations with your brothers,” Rogers said carefully, a thoughtful expression on his face. “How do you think you can help Loki?”

 _“Help Loki?”_ Stark repeated. “Are you kidding me? Please tell me you’re kidding me. This is the guy who just unleashed an army on New York! Why the fuck do you want to help him?”

Kyria bit her tongue. Some days never seemed to end. “Because he has green eyes,” she forced through clenched teeth, wings flat against her back.

“Yeah, and? So does Banner in a bad mood. You’re not honestly expecting me to believe we’re supposed to help Delusions of Grandeur because his eyes are _pretty?”_

Natasha seemed to catch on. “His eyes were blue on some of the tapes.”

Stark looked between them. “What? Are you – are you seriously telling me _alien magic made him do it?”_ Clint made an involuntary pained noise. “Yes, well, alien magic made _you_ do it, but _him?_ No way. He was running the show!”

“Different flavor than Robin Hood,” Gabriel said breezily. “Loki got the suggestible version. Someone else was pulling strings from a distance, gave him the scepter. I’m not saying he didn’t _want_ to take over the world, but without whoever hooked him up with the glow-stick and the army, he might have tried a less brute-force approach. He’s not my brother – he’s not Lucifer, he’s not _evil._ My day-job is serving douchebags their just desserts and Loki – he’s not hopeless. Not yet.”

“Are you suggesting he might have _succeeded_ if he acted under his own power?” Banner asked in incredulous horror.

“Maybe?” Gabriel shrugged. “Alternate endings aren’t really my thing. It’s entirely possible; I mean I could take over the world. But I don’t want to and it would be kind of a Luci thing to do. Besides, the planet’s a great place to hang out when other people are doing all the work,” he added with a grin.

“That part I can see,” Stark agreed. “I have no problem with that part. It’s the other parts that I’m finding – annoying. Like one of those pesky flying things that tried to eat me the one and only time I almost went camping.”

“A mosquito?” Clint asked.

“Yes! Exactly. Like whatever he just said,” Stark waved toward Clint with absent hands. “Although, now that I think of it, maybe not so much like that. More like the bastards with my weapons in Afghanistan. Yeah, annoying in a really pissed-off, what the fuck do you think you’re doing kind of way. Because are you saying what I _think_ you’re saying? That we should, what? _Redeem_ the guy who totaled Midtown? The one who wrecked _two_ of my suits? Sure I can make another, and there’s like – eight things I already want to improve on the next one, but this one was brand new, never been worn before, and now it looks like my floor!” Stark shook his head in disbelief. Then looked down at the floor in consideration. “Actually, did the Jolly Green Giant use Zod 2.0 to redecorate the floor? Because I absolutely approve of that.”

“People change,” Natasha replied, ignoring the rambling tangent and giving Stark a pointed look. He looked away.

Thor looked uncertain. “Do you trust your aggravating kindred, Lady?”

Kyria wouldn’t say she was exactly thrilled about trying to help the guy who went attacked her family, but unfortunately she agreed with Gabriel’s assessment that Loki wasn’t as far gone as Lucifer – Loki accepted he’d lost. Also, the mind control? Even if it had only been 99% Loki that unleashed space whales on New York, there was a chance. And Gabriel was used to dealing with assholes, and things that made humans look weak, so, really, he was probably the best qualified to tackle this. If Gabriel though Loki could be rehabilitated, he was probably right.

“He’s loud, rude, wildly inappropriate, poorly timed, and delights in making other people uncomfortable,” Kyria listed off much to Gabriel’s indignation. “But while I don’t trust him near my dignity, I do trust him with my life. If anyone can sort Loki out, it will be Gabriel.”

Thor studied her intensely, as if trying to read the future in her body language. Then he nodded. “Very well.” He pointed his hammer at the archangel, who still looked the picture of unconcerned about anything. “Should any harm befall upon my brother, know that I will look to you for reparations.”

To his credit, Gabriel didn’t laugh him off. Although knowing him, he probably wanted to. “Understood.”

Thor nodded again.

“The Director won’t like this,” Natasha noted.

Stark scowled. “The _Director_ lied to my face. Ask me if I care what he will or will not like.”

Surprisingly, Rogers agreed. “If Asgard is truly unable to contain Loki, we are responsible for finding an alternative that will be effective. Lux says Gabriel can contain him – that’s enough for me.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Loki reminded them snidely. “Thank you all for arguing about my future in my hearing without asking my opinion.”

“You get an opinion?” Stark asked in shock. “I thought you forfeited that right when you brought an _army_ into the heart of my city and lost.”

Loki’s glare would have been more effective if he didn’t still look like he lost an argument with a concrete floor. Gabriel put a tumbler of scotch in his hand. “Drink up. You’re a prisoner of war. But don’t worry! I’m much more fun than the one-eyed tyrant. Both of them.”

With a weary shrug, Loki tossed back the drink while Thor protested, “The All-father is not a tyrant,” and no one said a word about Nick Fury.

 

***

After giving Kyria a quick lesson on wings that resulted in hers thankfully disappearing, Gabriel disappeared with Loki in tow. Thor looked so downcast at that moment that Kyria found herself turning to Stark.

“How soon can you get a plane to Norway?”

“Why would you want to go back there?” Clint demanded.

“SHIELD had Jane Foster sent to Tromso when Selvig was taken. I thought that since we just conspired to make Thor’s brother disappear, we could at least let him see his girlfriend before he goes home,” she suggested.

“Lady Jane?” Thor asked with visible delight.

“Foster? She worked with Selvig, didn’t she? Huh,” Stark mused. “No wonder Point Break had his panties in such a twist. I should be able to get her here. I _am_ Tony Stark, after all. You get her to the airport, I’ll have her a plane if I have to buy another one. Hey, JARVIS, what’s the closest plane we can reroute to Tromso?”

Trying not to smile too widely at his antics, Kyria accepted the phone he tossed her way and dialed the SHIELD agent at the Tromso Observatory.

“Agent Levinson, this is Kyria Lux.” She recited her authorization over the line to prove her credentials.

“Agent Lux, what can I do for you?” he asked politely.

“Is that your boss?” asked a female voice on the Tromso side of the call. “Because if it is, I have a few things to say to them about getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and stuck on a plane to the middle of nowhere. I have _classes, papers_ I need to finish, _finals_ I have to study for – I’m supposed to graduate in a month! And I can’t do that if I fail my last classes because SHIELD put me into a really backwards kind of protective custody!”

Kyria couldn’t help but smile. “Is that Miss Lewis?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Levinson replied, grimace evident in voice as the person in question kept up a running list of complaints, “. . . Jane may be easily distractible with some shiny science toys, but I had to borrow some guy’s computer and hack the wi-fi, and seriously, why did no one tell us they were stashing us in some hole no one cares about while aliens invade New York? I mean, we survived the giant fire-breathing alien deathbot! You didn’t need to ship us to the ends of the earth . . . “

Across the room Stark had exchanged arguing with his AI for arguing with his girlfriend. “– no, Pep – you can yell at me later alright? I’m trying to arrange a booty call for my illustrious teammate – what? No, I’m not getting hookers for Captain America, who do you think I am? Okay, that’s a fair shot, but if I was going to have the Sentinel of Liberty debauched, I wouldn’t have to actually _pay_ someone. Come on, Pep, have you _seen_ his ass?”

Kyria shook her head, silently wondering what exactly she had gotten herself into. “You can put her on the phone.”

“Here,” Levinson said immediately, sounding immensely grateful to have someone else put up with his rather talkative charge.

“– what? It’s for me? Is it Agent iPod Thief? I still remember him, don’t think I don’t, confidentiality agreements or not, that whole experience is _branded_ in my brain – “

“As I recall, you got your iPod back,” Kyria reminded the opinionated girl.

“Well, yeah,” she reluctantly agreed, “after much emotional torment and trauma, I pried it out of one of his jackbooted thugs.”

Kyria fought back a laugh. “I don’t think there was much prying involved. And I wouldn’t exactly call Agent Barton a jackbooted thug.”

“It was a jackbooted thug,” Darcy Lewis insisted. “Where is Agent iPod Thief by the way? I liked him better than the one that woke me up at oh-dark-hundred to tell me I was about to go to Norway whether I wanted to or not. I don’t know where you fall of the ranking of men-in-black-who-screw-with-my-life. Women-in-black. Same diff. Who are you?”

Kyria smiled broadly at the phone. Open laughter took away from the image of the properly composed agent of SHIELD. Then again she was in a smashed room with a billionaire former-playboy who frequently acted like an overgrown child, a half-dressed scientist her ribs were still complaining about, an alien god whose brother she just sent off with perhaps the most irresponsible person she knew, an assassin whose chosen methods of interrogation often involved being tied to a chair, and a prankster who could land a Nerf dart between someone’s eyes while dropping upside-down from a hole in the ceiling, so _composed_ wasn’t quite on the agenda at the moment. “Miss Lewis, I am Agent Kyria Lux.”

“Are you one of Agent iPod Thief’s decidedly un-merry band of jackbooted thugs?”

“I work with Agent Coulson, but, no, I was not in New Mexico, if that is what you mean. I’m calling to let you know that in – “ she covered the mouth of the phone with her hand and looked at Stark. “What’s the status on that plane?”

He frowned. “Two and a half hours. What is SHIELD’s fascination with places that are terribly difficult to get to? Also,” Stark added, still annoyed about not instantaneously getting his way, “air traffic’s grounded in the area, so I haven’t worked out where I can land them yet.”

“Well, you’re a genius and we’ve got a few hours, we’ll figure something out,” Kyria replied, before removing her hand. “ – in two and a half hours there will be a plane at the airport to take you and Dr. Foster to New York.”

“Are you kidding? It will take that long to pry her out of the lab! She barely separated from the shiny science things when I ran in to tell her aliens were in New York. And then she realized her big blonde boyfriend was back and hadn’t let her know and went back to play science. And by play science I mean almost blow something up because she was too busy moping about Mr. Muscles to pay attention to what she was doing.”

“And if you told her that Thor would be waiting for her in New York?”

A pause. “She’ll probably complain about the wait and spend the whole flight theorizing how to make teleportation possible. When she’s not sighing over his biceps. We’ll be there. Hey, Agent Jackboot-in-Training, talk to the miracle worker while I go make sure Jane doesn’t forget to turn off the bomb-making things in her hurry to get back to her boyfriend.”

“Um, hi?”

Kyria almost felt bad for Levinson, except she had to deal with far more excitable personalities – Stark, Thor, Loki, Gabriel, to name a few of the current selection. “There will be a Stark industries plane at the airport in two and a half hours. Please see to it that Foster and Lewis are on it.”

“Uh, yes, ma’am.”

“Good.”

Stark looked up as she ended the call. “And that is my post-battle good deed of the day. I’m hungry. Is anyone else hungry? I saw this shawarma place during the fight. No idea what shawarma is but I kinda want to find out before Pepper gets here and carries out her threat to kill me. Who’s with me?”

“Your girl would really try to kill you, Stark?” Rogers asked, amused.

“Who wouldn’t?” Nat replied with a smirk.

“The Lady Jane is on her way?” Thor asked.

“Yeah, it’s a long flight though. Probably won’t be here ‘til morning,” Stark mused with a frown. “I could probably design a faster airplane. Not as fast as my suit, but . . . faster.”

“Not the time, man,” Clint remarked. “I want food before that last window I crashed through catches up to me.”

 _“Clint!”_ Kyria and Nat scolded in sync.

The archer shrugged unrepentantly.

 

***

The shawarma place had taken a beating, but it was still standing, which was better than some. A liberal application of money convinced the owners to feed seven superheroes too exhausted from the battle to talk over the meal. When no one wanted to get up afterwards, Stark regained enough brain coherency to offer to let them crash at his place.

(Someone remembered to bring food back for Selvig. Kyria didn’t remember who, or even who got him down from the roof. Adrenaline, battle-fever, lingering worry, and a strong dose of alien energy combined in a way to make her strung-out. If this was how a hang-over felt, she was _glad_ it took excessive lengths to get her drunk.)

Crash being almost literal as they mostly just dropped onto whatever bed/couch/chair/reasonably comfortable surface was available. Tony even got a whole five hours of sleep before waking up Bruce and Kyria with a Crazy Science Idea.

“Are you _kidding me?!”_ Darcy exclaimed sometime later when Kyria met them at the airport and let them know how they would be getting past the roadblocks into the city.

“What?” Kyria replied with a grin more cheerful than her short sleep schedule would suggest. Hooking up to the Tesseract apparently gave her a lot of internal energy, even more than that nuclear reactor more than a decade ago, and she didn’t even eat the Tesseract. Those few hours of sleep apparently allowed her system to stabilize the influx of energy; she was in no hurry for her wings to come back. “You don’t want to fly Air Chitauri?”

“I don’t want to end up on YouTube!”

“Stark woke me early to attach the optic camouflage SHIELD employs on some of its aerial vehicles.”

“This doesn’t look big enough for any kind of camouflage. Where’s the power source?” Jane asked, circling the alien sled to get a better look at Stark’s additions.

Kyria grinned. “Right here.”

The flight back to Stark Tower featured Darcy gushing over the view and wishing she could get a camera without releasing her death-grip on the side-rail while Jane asked endless questions about the sled, the Chitauri, Stark’s tech, how Kyria produced energy and every other thing she could think of. Including Thor. Thankfully, the alien-god in question was waiting on the roof and Jane suddenly had better things to occupy her attention. (And her mouth.)

Also waiting at the tower was a red-headed CEO, enough Chinese take-out to feed an army (or seven superheroes plus civilian additions), a scientist severely screwed up by an alien playing in his head and lured out of hiding by the food, and an imposing figure in a leather coat who wanted (demanded) to know what the fuck happened with Loki.

To say that Fury was displeased that the villain had ridden (been dragged by consensus vote) off into the sunset with an irresponsible loose cannon who could bypass security with a snap of his fingers and was the reason NINJAT was buried was like saying the alien space whales had caused a _little_ property damage.

(“Loki? Isn’t that the guy who sent the fire-breathing deathbot last year? Your uncle can handle a guy who commands armies and fire-breathing deathbots?”

“As he likes to remind people, he’s an _archangel._ Failed world tyrants are beneath him.”)

Fury was even less pleased when loose conversation resulted in the four civilians (non-Avengers, not that he was overly happy about the Avengers either) in the tower also being informed of Kyria’s parentage. She wasn’t as concerned about guarding it as closely as she had. She suspected she had Loki to thank for getting past that particular existential crisis. Freaking out over Clint brought the question out from under the rock she buried it under, everything from going after the Hulk to fighting on the streets of Manhattan had highlighted exactly why incognito wasn’t working out for her, and then hearing Gabriel’s proclamation that she had reached the edge and come back (without realizing it) had broken through all her layers of fear and repression.

Yes, she was Morningstar. No, she wasn’t her father. She would _never be_ her father – she cared too much about the family she had created for herself.

“Your father is Satan? Really? Huh. I wonder if there’s a mythological bingo card out there. Because I am seriously rocking that if there is.”

Tony offered Darcy a job on the spot. After hearing of her scientist wrangling skills, Pepper seconded the offer. Tony rounded out the suggestion by telling Jane (and reminding Bruce) about Scientist Candyland. Selvig was included in the offer, but he was a bit twitchy and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“Please take the job, Miss Lewis,” Pepper implored. “I don’t think I’ll be able to handle more of them on my own – Tony was bad enough.”

“I mean, I still have to graduate, alien invasion and side-trip to Norway aside, but it was kind of fun being Jane’s assistant. Not the fire-breathing deathbot part, or even the let’s-get-closer-to-the-science-tornado, but the making-sure-Jane-eats-and-her-equipment-has-enough-gum-holding-it-together wasn’t bad, and the finding-out-I-tased-a-god was actually pretty awesome.”

“You tased a god?”

“Yeah. Thor. When he first crashed in the desert he was doing this Crazy Guy routine and totally freaked me out. So I tased him,” she said with a shrug.

“You _tased_ Thor?” Tony asked with wide eyes and a grin.

“Lady Darcy indeed felled me with a lightning touch,” Thor solemnly agreed.

“He was human at the time. But very hot. Still very hot, actually, but very taken. And if Jane’s going to be here playing science, someone has to make sure she eats more than every three days. One thing though - if I say yes, is SHIELD going to try to steal my iPod again?”

“They wouldn’t dare,” Tony said immediately, with a pointed look at Fury. “Also, iPod? There are no candy-colored products from such terrible companies allowed in my presence. I will make you something better. Give me two days.”

_“Tony.”_

“Pepper’s right. I broke two suits this week and need to get on replacing those. Give me a week.”

Darcy blinked, clearly unused to Tony Stark. But he grew on people. Like fungus. “The city’s in shambles and you’re gonna make me a new iPod? Not that I’m complaining or anything, but . . . shouldn’t you be designing like new steel beams or something?”

“Beams?” Tony repeated. “You doubt my genius if you think I do anything as plebian as steel beams. Why can’t I make a new iPod? A StarkPod!” Pepper fondly shook her head at the name. “I could make a limited edition batch, with cases to match the team – all proceeds go to repair the city.”

Pepper’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s not such a terrible idea, actually. Stark Industries hold the rights to the Iron Man name because I had to handle the paperwork for Tony. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to add other Avengers to the Iron Man merchandise being produced. A portion of the profit could be donated to handle the aftermath here. If you’re all okay with being on backpacks and lunchboxes, that is.”

“You think anyone would actually want to own a Hulk lunchbox?” Bruce asked in disbelief. It occurred to Kyria that sometime during the slightly sleep deprived modification of an alien hoverboard, she’d ended up on a first-name basis with the rest of the team.

“I would,” Clint immediately said, raising a hand. “I want the whole collection.”

“Bruce,” Nat said patiently, “the other guy took down flying leviathans. I think it’s safe to say you’re going to have fans. We all are. And as long as no one uses my real name or face or tries to make a Black Widow Barbie, I think I’m okay with that.”

“I’m with Nat,” Kyria agreed. “I get that I joined the ranks of female action heroes, but if Orion becomes an overly sexualized icon, there will be blood.”

Nat smiled in a manner that sent more than one highly trained operative running from the room screaming.

To her credit, Pepper merely raised an eyebrow. “I’ve survived Tony – I think I can handle juvenile-minded product designers.”

A sudden thought made Kyria freeze. “We should be prepared for the _Supernatural_ fans,” she said weakly.

Clint smothered a laugh and Fury looked like he wanted to shoot lasers from his eye. A part of her idly wondered if Tony would ever make him a prosthetic that shot lasers to replace the eye patch. And she was _never_ voicing that thought because Tony _would._

“I’m sorry, what fans?” Pepper asked confused.

“Supernatural. It’s a book series by Carver Edlund. I’m a character. So are Clint and Phil.”

“Where is Phil? He’s very good at damage control, I thought.” It seemed everyone liked to give Tony pointed looks. Whether he chose to acknowledge them was a different matter. As Pepper appeared to be reminding him of the whole “I am Iron Man” fiasco, he ignored it.

He also ignored Fury’s attempt to answer. “Agent Agent took an alien spear to the chest. Old St. Nick here told us he died, had this whole guilt-trip number with bloody Capsicle trading cards. _Then_ we find out, nope, he’s still alive. Heard it straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”

It was Kyria’s turn to ignore Fury’s glare. In fact, she glared right back. “When he wakes up, he’s going to be very upset you ruined his cards. I hope you plan on replacing them. Near _mint,_ Director.” When he said nothing, she smiled. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t Nat’s smile either. “If you would prefer, I can have the Tech Twins find replacements and charge your account.”

Tony laughed. “Oh, I like you. Can I keep you? All of you, actually. Except you,” he added, with an accusatory finger at Nat. “You stabbed me in the neck. SHIELD can keep you.” The he grimaced. “But then I wouldn’t have the whole set, and I’m with Legolas on this one – I _want_ the whole set. So I guess I’ll have to take you too. If you come near me with sharp pointy things, I reserve the right to send you back. Wait, no, I change my mind again. I’ll let Fury keep you just as long as you keep doing that. All of you. See? That expression, right there! Priceless! Please tell me you’re recording this, JARVIS.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“I thought I was the only one who could give him that constipated look. But Sparky can too!”

“Sparky?” Kyria repeated.

“Hey, it could be Sparkle Wings.”

“Wings?” Fury repeated.

“I didn’t mention those?” she asked innocently.

Tony cackled like a mad scientist.

 

***

Despite not getting his way at all during the informal debrief over Chinese, Fury gave them another two days before ordering their asses up to the Helicarrier for a proper debrief and medical evaluation.

Clint got wary looks and a wide berth almost as soon as he stepped out of the quinjet.

The rest of the Avengers didn’t stand for that.

Nat took his arm and gave offenders her best _I’m going to rip your spleen out with my teeth_ smile. Steve got a very determined look and had a rather loud conversation with Thor about what a valuable part of the team Hawkeye was. Bruce added his agreement while Tony made sharp comments about how well any of the little cubicle-minions would have fared against Loki’s control and argued with Kyria over the best way to take down the Helicarrier using someone of Hawkeye’s ability.

The wide berth was extended to the whole team. They were okay with that.

Medical was decidedly displeased they had waited three days before showing up. Tony pointed out that none of them was dying and more than half of them knew field medicine and the only reason they were here _at all_ was because Fury was a one-eyed tyrant.

The doctors weren’t impressed.

Nat almost broke one guy’s arm when he tried to give Clint a sedative. Steve _did_ give the guy a “Captain America is disappointed in you” lecture.

Kyria almost got into a shouting match with Fury before Clint was allowed to leave. That she was an agent of SHIELD and _still_ arguing with Director got her looks of awe from some of the medical staff and made them more agreeable when she and Nat promised to make sure Clint attended his mandated sessions with a SHIELD psychologist. It might also have helped that Tony offered to buy Clint from SHIELD and Kyria flat out threatened to make Clint disappear if anyone tried to bury and/or arrest him.

Just because hunters no longer operated below the radar the way they used to have to, didn’t mean they forgot how.

Generally pissed at SHIELD and its Director, the Avengers accompanied Tony back to his tower where Dr. Selvig was treated to an info-dump courtesy of JARVIS’ recording capabilities that was probably more world-altering than Loki’s mind control, if not quite as traumatizing. In shock and still kind of twitchy, Kyria sent Selvig to South Dakota. If anyone could help him get his head back on straight, it would be Bobby.

Much to Jane’s disappointment, Thor left the next day with the Tesseract.

War Machine arrived shortly thereafter and Colonel Rhodes (“If you’re gonna be around this guy, one, let me express my sincere condolences, and two, you might as well call me Rhodey.”) promptly embarrassed himself by gushing over Captain America.

Steve politely replied that he was getting somewhat used to the fact that most people had embarrassing reactions to him, especially after Agent Coulson’s “I watched you while you were sleeping” speech –

“Wait, was Agent’s name _Edward?_ Because I thought it was Agent, but Pepper told me it was Phil, but now he sounds like an Edward.”

“Why would he be Edward?”

“Ignore him, Cap, he’s making references to bad pop culture.”

“Very bad pop culture. I know actual vampires. And while Lenore is nice enough to take in anyone willing to not hunt humans, even she occasionally entertains the idea of hunting down Stephanie Meyer.”

“Um.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t understand what they’re talking about either.”

“Oh my god, do you live under a _rock?_ No – don’t answer that. I know you disappeared to third world countries to get in touch with your inner Buddha or something, but seriously, how I did not think it was physically _possible_ to miss the devastating wave of insanity _Twilight_ heralded. I’m telling you, the average global IQ dropped at least nine points when that hit theaters.”

“It’s series of books that became movies. Adolescent girls loved it; most everyone else thought it was terrible.”

“Uh, no, ‘terrible’ does not begin to describe that. If they used those movies on me in Afghanistan, rather than the guns and the waterboarding and all that – I might have actually built them a Jericho. Just to make it _stop.”_

“It’s probably better if you don’t watch the movies. They present an unfavorable picture of the state of twenty-first century entertainment.”

“I wouldn’t call that entertainment. And threatening me with a paperclip won’t make me even _consider_ calling that entertainment. It’s torture. Terrible, awful, brain-rotting torture. Hey! Watch it with that thing! I will throw you out of my tower, don’t think I won’t! I warned you about pointy things and proximity.”

“I believe the exact phrasing was ‘sharp, pointy things.’”

“Paperclips _are_ sharp!”

“Tony, don’t argue with the Russian assassin.”

“Hmph. Some friend you are.”

“She can kill you. She can kill _me.”_

“Not that I’m entirely opposed to the idea, but how’d we get to Nat killing Tony?”

“Phil made a fool of himself when he met his hero.”

“I’m not – I’m just a guy from Brooklyn – I’m not a hero.”

“Captain, you’re on all the news stations smashing aliens with your shield. I think it’s safe to say that most people _are_ going to consider you a hero, WWII propaganda or not.”

 

***

According to news networks, they were _all_ heroes.

Thankfully though, Ash and Charlie did good work and there were no clear images of Kyria, Nat, or Clint from the battle, so amidst the ongoing media storm, they were able to retain some level of anonymity.

Tony, on the other hand, was used to reporters, and was doing press conferences, interviews, the whole works. Everyone knew he was Iron Man, and Iron Man had been present during the battle, and everyone wanted to know what had happened. Tony was surprisingly good at diverting attention away from inquiries about his teamwork. Then again, he spent a lot of time in the spotlight. He was on the news for his large monetary donations to the recovery efforts, advertising the new line of Avengers merchandise, and trying to drum up more support for the Battle of New York. His way of course.

“The Battle of New York? What kind of name is that? Boring, that’s what I call it. We weren’t fighting for New York. Well, I mean, technically we were, but we were also fighting for the world. If we didn’t stop them here there would have been nasty alien things _everywhere._ That wouldn’t be fun.”

Iron Man also showed up in the suit to blast apart the fallen leviathans and do some heavy lifting while his teammates hid their identities in the anonymous mass of volunteers moving rubble and handing out supplies.

Most of his teammates, anyway. As a rather recognizable icon, Pepper and Darcy (also Tony, Nat, Kyria, and Clint) convinced Steve to put his uniform back on for some publicity shots of Captain America helping with the clean-up. When the news media accused him of being everything from an actor to an opportunistic soldier to a clone to his own grandson, Pepper and Tony helped Steve handle the media sharks who wanted to know what a WWII hero/propaganda-star was doing in the twenty-first century.

SHIELD meanwhile had its own media frenzy to deal with.

Tony made more than a few comments about SHIELD suddenly being in the public eye. (“See? I said it was historically not possible. Didn’t I say that?”)

Either there was a leak, or someone talked where or to whom they shouldn’t, or someone high up decided to make SHIELD deal with a mess they partly caused, because it seemed all the news networks knew about SHIELD and its connections to the battle and the heroes who saved New York.

Iron Man was a SHIELD consultant; Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Orion were SHIELD agents; Captain America had been revived by SHIELD; the Hulk was contained/controlled/created by SHIELD (reports varied on that one); and Thor and Orion were aliens SHIELD made contact with, Thor returning home and Orion staying to become an agent.

Reports varied on Orion as well. She was an agent was powers from an experiment; she was an agent who’d been exposed to an alien artifact; she was an alien turned agent; she was an agent whose father was the alien; she was an agent who was also Thor’s daughter –

They had a laugh about that last one. Steve was amazed there were so many explanations out there for Orion’s abilities and astounded upon being told SHIELD was purposefully muddying the waters. Nat took credit for starting the rumor that Orion had been born under a particularly powerful astronomical alignment, while Clint claimed the one where she was the mythological hunter reincarnated.

Tony hacked into SHIELD (again) and announced that the official report was vague so the Monochromatic Cyclops was good for _something_ at least.

There were enough science geeks and conspiracy theorists that Bruce wasn’t quite as lucky about keeping under the radar, but between Tony showing off for the cameras and Steve taking one for the team, he mostly got to hide out in the medical tents.

As a number of Kyria’s ninjas filtered into New York to help with the relief efforts, Lily joined Bruce in the medical tents, and the not-a-medical-doctor-but-still-a-practicing-field-medic was tentatively pleased to find someone who wasn’t afraid of the other guy. Steve turned red when Tony made his usual jokes about Bruce’s love life, and redder when Lily blandly replied that as much as she liked Bruce, she had a girlfriend. Of all of them, Lily emulated Phil the most.

Lenore and her family of vegetarian vampires came to help, as did the ragtag pack of Ninja-tagged werewolves, including the kid Kyria and Jake captured the night she got the phone call. Tony got a kick out of the fact that werewolves and vampires were cleaning up after aliens. Thankfully, he didn’t mention it anywhere someone could get a sound bite.

He _did_ try to headhunt some of the ninjas, the Tech Twins in particular, and was very put out when they all turned him down. Admittedly Charlie turned him down while hyperventilating.

“– oh my god, Tony Stark just offered me a job! Tony. Stark. You’re like, my hero! One of my heroes. But you’re right up there with Hermione! And as much as I would absolutely _love_ to come work for you, I can’t just _stop_ what I’m doing now. Admittedly tracking angelic genealogies is slow work, but I’m almost positive we got a match on this family in Illinois, and oh god, that was totally ninja-classified, forget I said anything – “

Tony took rejection surprisingly well, probably because _he_ liked to be the one doing all the talking, and there was an impressive amount of nerd-hero-worship going on, and Charlie and Ash agreed to stay in contact with him because who _wouldn’t_ want Tony Stark on speed dial for technical support? The guy had an honest-to-god _AI_ and _robots._ All around, there was geek glory.

Bruce was also enthused about the previously hidden ninja treasure trove and was very interested in the research into finding cures for such things as lycanthropy and vampirism. Afraid to lose one of his “science bros,” Tony immediately threw money at SHIELD’s research – and bought one of the labs involved.

Meanwhile, displaying a surprising sense of tact, Andy stayed away from Clint, although Bobby roped him into being Selvig’s phone buddy. Displaying somewhat less tact, unsurprisingly, Tony tried to get Jake and Steve to arm-wrestle. When Jake refused to challenge Captain America (although he had no such qualms about _sparring_ with Captain America), _Tony_ challenged Jake to an arm-wrestling match – in the suit. At Pepper’s suggestion, JARVIS recorded the match and sent everyone a copy without telling Tony.

Upon learning who had conspired with his AI in such a treacherous manner, Tony expressed his disbelief and appreciation of his girlfriend’s devious mind.

Tony almost got himself shot when he tried to buy Dean’s car. Somehow, the two of them ended up friends afterwards. Sam didn’t have an explanation, but he thought it probably had something to do with Tony’s genuine appreciation of classic cars and loud music and the billionaire’s offer to help the hunter find parts next time the Impala was damaged.

Much to Kyria and the Winchesters’ horror, _Supernatural_ book sales jumped when one of the survivors of the Midtown attack mentioned Orion and Hawkeye being characters in a book he read. Pepper, relentlessly dogged in her work and coordinating with SHIELD through Bela in Phil’s absence, prepared Chuck with a statement about encountering a SHIELD team on a mission (details classified), and having been so impressed by the agents that he based characters on them. No, of course the characters are fictitious, demons aren’t _real_ (weak laughter) – and SHIELD already made their feelings known about the liberties taken with the characters.

They managed to keep Becky away from the interviewers.

Tony claimed salvage rights to whatever alien tech he could get his hands on. SHIELD got the rest, including the occasional bystander who picked up said alien tech. Kyria kept a few flying sleds for herself, although Tony agreed to hold onto them – no touching, testing, or upgrading – as a bribe to lure her back where he could pick her brain on alien science and biology.

Most of the immediate clean-up was done by the time the constant attention and staying-in-one-place wore thin on ingrained secrecy and the ninjas and Super-Secret-Spy Avengers (Tony’s description) scattered back into the wind.

It was another three months before Kyria found out Lilith had escaped Hell.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm creeping up to Dark World, so I really need to watch that one of these days. Having reinstated one of Supernatural's villian arcs (heavily edited of course), it's about time to screw around with the MCU canon. With Loki not under Asgardian house arrest, Dark World won't the same. Without having seen the movie yet, that's all I can say for certain. Hopefully it won't take as many rewrites as _Assemble._
> 
>  
> 
> ***END PHASE ONE***


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